Can one professor hold more than one endowed chair?

Question

Are there examples of one person holding more than one endowed chair at the same university?

Answer 1

I had personally never heard of anyone occupying two endowed chairs at the same time at the same university. Even if a person had two appointments in separate departments at the same university (for example, History of Science and Psychology), they were usually listed as the:

• Dunning-Kruger Professor of Psychology and History of Science

or alternately, if the endowed line (the DK-Professorship) had been bequeathed specifically to Psychology for example:

• Dunning-Kruger Professor of Psychology, Professor of History of Science

So the short answer is: no.

But that being said, there are always exceptions. A little digging around at universities that have separate sub-units revealed that, at Harvard there is a person in History who holds two endowed chairs and one regular position:

• Annette Gordon-Reed
  • Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School
  • Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute
  • [Harvard U. FAS] Professor of History

I personally think that this exception proves the rule since the three professorships are at nominally separate entities (HLS, Radcliffe I, and Harvard U FAS) that are under the singular Harvard conglomerate umbrella.