Ever since the first endowed professorship was established 500 years ago at Oxford, privately funded “chairs” have been essential tools for helping universities to reach the peak of accomplishment and prestige.
As a perpetual source of funding to support the work of selected faculty members, chairs are a critical infusion to the life’s blood of the institution. Both a reward to an established professor for excellence in research and teaching and an inducement to younger rising stars to join the school’s ranks, they are an essential incentive that enables UCLA to compete on a more equal footing with other top-tier institutions. Especially those with abundant private support.
UCLA currently boasts 189 endowed chairs in a wide range of academic disciplines, from medicine and economics to philosophy and music. And more may be on the horizon. A task force created by Chancellor Albert Carnesale to examine how UCLA can maintain its competitiveness in an era of shrinking budgets has recommended that the university launch a “bold new initiative to support its academic core as its highest post-Campaign development priority” by, among other measures, raising funds to create additional new endowed chairs.
“Faculty recruitment and retention are vital to UCLA’s competitiveness both in research and teaching,” the task force wrote in its report, noting that UCLA has far fewer endowed chairs than leading private universities and peer institutions. Raising more chairs “will catalyze the campus’ many friends around the imperative of providing essential support for UCLA’s academic core.”
There are four types of endowed chairs at UCLA. Chancellor’s Professorships, which are established with a gift of $2.5 million, recognize a “senior academician or master professional who has significantly advanced his or her field.” Executive Chairs ($1.5 million) acknowledge the “superior academic or administrative leadership of a provost, dean or department chair.” Endowed Chairs ($1 million) are used to “attract, retain and fund the long-range research of a distinguished scholar.” Term Chairs ($500,000) “support the career development of promising younger faculty.”
Following are snapshots of six UCLA faculty whose leading-edge research and teaching is supported through endowed chairs.
HEATHER MAYNARD
Howard Reiss Career Development Chair in Chemistry & Biology
Heather Maynard is exactly the type of up-and-coming young scientist that former UCLA faculty member John McTague had in mind when he created the Howard Reiss Career Development Chair in the College of Letters and Science.
Her revolutionary research examines the use of polymers as cancer-inhibiting drugs. In addition to developing strategies to create polymeric drugs that inhibit cancer, “we are also using a technique called molecular imprinting to prepare materials that detect tumor markers,” says Maynard, who came to UCLA in August 2002 as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and as a member of the multidisciplinary California NanoSystems Institute. Detecting these markers has important diagnostic and prognostic value in fighting cancer, she explains.
With B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Caltech, respectively, and an M.S. in materials science from UC Santa Barbara, Maynard’s skills and research are truly interdisciplinary. Before joining the UCLA faculty, she was an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and University of Zurich in Switzerland.
Being offered the chair was one of the deciding factors in coming to UCLA, she says. Having unrestricted funds “gives me more freedom to buy equipment and work on projects that are in their beginning stages. [This helps] develop new ideas and get preliminary results that will yield additional funding from other sources.”
That’s what McTague had hoped for when he endowed the Reiss Chair, which honors another UCLA professor. McTague, who also established the John P. McTague Career Development Chair and the Seaborg Medal endowment, taught at UCLA for 12 years and is a professor of materials science at UC Santa Barbara. His background includes a stint as deputy and then acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and as science adviser to Presidents Reagan and the senior Bush.
“When I was a professor at UCLA, the department was very supportive. There was a great sense of collegiality, of community. Helping to bring in and nurture younger members of the community, early in their careers, has more leverage than other ways of giving support,” says McTague. “I saw this as an opportunity to say thank you,” and to help a superb public university stay competitive with private schools and “preserve the excellence of faculty and students.”
The endowment also allows Maynard and her students to attend scientific meetings and conferences, where they share work and learn what others are doing, and to “make it possible for me to hire undergraduates for summer research positions that will prepare them to become better scientists.”
ANNE PEBLEY
Fred H. Bixby Chair in Population Policy
As a sociologist and a demographer interested in public health, Anne Pebley favors an interdisciplinary approach to research. But she often finds it difficult to combine all these areas in her studies. As the Bixby Chair in the School of Public Health, Pebley now has the flexibility to combine disciplines, a move she hopes will yield important findings on population and quality-of-life issues.
Pebley, who came to UCLA in 1999 from the Rand Corp., focuses her work on such issues as children’s health and well-being, fertility and contraception. She has looked at population and quality-of-life issues in places as close as Los Angeles and as far away as Bangladesh. One of her largest projects, for example, focuses on how families, neighborhoods and social programs work together to improve quality of life for children and teens.
“With this endowment, I’ve been able to do interdisciplinary research I couldn’t have done otherwise,” notes Pebley.
Micro financing is another project area she is investigating. “Micro financing can make huge changes in the power dynamics in families,” she explains. “Even a very small loan can affect the poor by providing capital to start a small business.” This can have a major impact on women, she adds. “A woman who earns money has more power, which gives her more choices in such things as when, or if, she marries, has children, uses birth control. I think this will be an important project in the long run.”
The chair — the first for the School of Public Health — was funded by the Bixby Foundation, which was established in the will of Fred H. Bixby. Bixby, scion of the pioneer Southern California family that established the Bixby Ranch Co., was interested in population control and family planning, says John Warren, a foundation trustee.
“Fred Bixby considered [overpopulation] to be one of the major problems facing society,” Warren explains. “In our early years, I think we were the only foundation in America that was devoted exclusively to population control and family planning.”
Studying population trends is critical to society, Pebley agrees. “The dramatic growth in the world’s population in the past 50 years has put great stress on environmental resources. It has also changed social institutions. What are the social consequences of that growth?”
Because the endowment is not tied to a specific research project, “starting something new or innovative is possible,” she says. “This lets you take risks. And in research, taking risks is really important.”
UDAY KARMARKAR
The Los Angeles Times Professor of Management and Policy
Uday Karmarkar has several research studies going on, but the most ambitious — and the one most likely to have the biggest impact — takes a look at how today’s information technology is changing business management.
Karmarkar, who has held the Times Chair since arriving at UCLA’s Anderson School in 1994, says his Business and Information Technologies Project, which has research partners in five countries and is expected to expand to 20 within a few years, has the potential to affect business practices worldwide.
Just as industrialization changed society and industry decades ago, “the way businesses work is changing again,” he explains. “Companies even now report that they are becoming flatter in terms of organization. Many more tasks and whole processes are being outsourced. Employees are less anchored to desks or cubicles. That changes the way companies work.”
It has been believed that the service sector was protected from global competition because services are hard to transport and export. But more and more service tasks, such as financial transaction, customer response and retail sales, can be conducted on Web sites or via computer, fax and phone. It used to be, Karmarkar says, that one had to be physically present at a location to access some services, such as a library to conduct research or a theater to see a movie. “That’s not true today, and it is beginning to change society,” he says.
Focusing on such changes will help businesses to prepare for them. “It gives managers an opportunity to learn what is happening in other firms, industries and countries, and to determine the best business practices,” he explains. “We can start to strategize to see what the best approach is to survive and do well. At the individual level, we ask what jobs are affected, and prepare for the changes.”
The music business, he says, is a good example of how an industry can be caught off guard by the shifts in technology. “Peer-to-peer file exchange and barter created a situation no one had prepared for,” Karmarkar says. “They will have to come up with a different business model, where music is distributed and sold in different ways. But the industry will never be the same.”
Since 1962, the Times Mirror Foundation, an affiliate of Tribune Co., has given more than $90 million in grants, says Executive Director Michelle Williams. “Education,” she says, “has always been an important part of the Times Mirror Foundation’s giving.”
JAMES WEISS
Chizuko Kawata Chair in Cardiology
As the Chizuko Kawata chair in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, James Weiss is studying cardiac arrhythmias — irregular heartbeats — which account for 300,000 sudden cardiac deaths each year and is the single-greatest cause of heart-related deaths.
Weiss’ research spans molecular, animal and clinical investigations and also uses computer modeling. “We have a virtual heart that can simulate abnormalities to produce these arrhythmias,” he says.
Weiss, who is chief of the Division of Cardiology and director of the UCLA Cardiovascular Research Laboratory, has held the Kawata Chair since 1991. The endowment has been a boon to his studies, he says, because it supports preliminary research that is necessary to gain larger research grants and to pursue new research directions.
For instance, Weiss wanted to understand if so-called “chaos theory” could be applied to gain insights into ventricular fibrillation, which is the type of arrhythmia that causes sudden death.
“The endowment provided support to allow me to collaborate with mathematicians and physicists to investigate this question,” he says. “If you can detect the chaos, you can get insights into the mechanisms that are causing it. That led to a new approach to develop drugs to prevent fibrillation. That’s a good example of how seed money can support a program.”
This research led to UCLA becoming a National Institutes of Health Specialized Center of Research (SCOR) in Sudden Cardiac Death, one of only three in the country. “Our program evolved directly from resources that came from this chair,” Weiss says.
Finding scientific answers is like working a jigsaw puzzle, putting small research points together, building on what others have found in their studies and taking one step at a time. “But you don’t solve the puzzle by yourself,” Weiss says. “You solve it over time through the collective efforts of many scientists.”
The Kawata Chair was established in 1991 by cardiologist and UCLA Clinical Professor of Medicine Nobuyuki Kawata, who passed away last year. Kawata, co-founder of the UCLA Heart Failure and Heart Transplant Program, endowed the chair in memory of his wife, Chizuko.
“Dr. Weiss brings to the Kawata Chair a tremendous blend of academic and clinical medicine,” says Jon A. Kobashigawa, medical director of the UCLA Heart Transplant Program and Kawata’s son-in-law.
Kobashigawa, who is also a clinical professor of medicine/cardiology and chief of the Division of Clinical Faculty Medicine at UCLA, says his colleague has been a pioneer in the understanding of cardiac injury and arrhythmias in patients who suffer heart attacks, and his work has led to the development of life-saving therapies.
Says Kobashigawa: “Dr. Weiss truly represents the finest in education, research and patient care that epitomizes the memory of Dr. Kawata.”
STEPHEN YEAZELL
David G. and Dallas P. Price Professor of Law
Stephen Yeazell is an expert in procedural law and has always been interested in how people settle disputes, how all the players interact in litigation and how these rules make society stronger. As holder of the Price Chair in the School of Law since 2001, he focuses on the dynamics of contemporary civil litigation.
“My goal is to try to understand what has happened to civil litigation in the 20th century,” says Yeazell, last year’s chair of the Academic Senate and a former junior high school English and history teacher who earned a law degree from Harvard and clerked for California Supreme Court Justice Matthew Tobriner before coming to UCLA in 1975.
An author of books, articles and reviews about the history and theory of procedure, Yeazell is also sought after at legal conferences. In December, he will address the American Bar Association’s Vanishing Trials Project, a special litigation meeting in San Francisco that will explore whether there are fewer trials today than in decades past, “what this means and is it something we should worry about.”
The way we settle disputes, while not always neat and tidy, “has been an important source of strength to our society,” he says. But civil litigation changed greatly during the 20th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, he explains, noted Harvard Law Professor Roscoe Pound said courts were granting too many new trials. Today, Yeazell says, “no informed observer would think this is a problem; if anything, those close to the system worry about the opposite — whether there are too few trials.
“Something has happened and it’s worth figuring out.”
Why? Because, he says, the trial has been “both a powerful symbol of justice and a way of resolving disputes” in U.S. and British society. “We’ve developed an interesting and remarkable system for resolving disputes,” he says. “But we need to understand how those rules are evolving. As we look at developing societies, we start talking about the rule of law, that we need some kind of orderly system to resolve disputes, enforce contracts, etc.”
The Price endowment, he says, allows him to magnify his research by financing research assistants, who also work with others in the law school.
For David Price LL.B. ’60, chairman of Santa Monica, Calif.–based American Airports Corp., endowing a chair was a way of showing his gratitude to a university that had a huge impact on his life.
“I feel very beholden to UCLA,” he says. His first job after law school resulted from the recommendation of one of his professors, and “later, when I did well in business, I wanted to help the law school. I wanted to have something that would attract quality professors to a state-funded university to increase the excellence of the program.”
MICHAEL COLLEARY
Lew and Pamela Hunter/Jonathan Zakin Chair in Screenwriting
With successful screen credits that include Face/Off and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Michael Colleary brings real-life writing experience to his Screenwriting 434 graduate seminar.
“Writers are always the poor stepchildren in entertainment,” says Colleary, this year’s Hunter/Zakin Chair in the School of Theater, Film and Television. “So the fact that someone singled out the screenwriting program [for an endowment] is an extremely meaningful act. It’s a shot in the arm for the faculty and the culture of the film school and the writing department.”
Colleary M.F.A. ’86 is the second recipient of the chair. He follows in the footsteps of his writing partner and fellow UCLA alum, Mike Werb M.F.A. ’02, who held it last year.
Jonathan N. Zakin says he established the endowment to honor retired UCLA screenwriting instructor Lew Hunter. “I started to write screenplays as a hobby, and Lew mentored me,” says Zakin, chairman of the San Francisco–based Proxim Corp., which provides wireless networking products. “He took a lot of time with me, and I was impressed with that. When he retired, I thought it would be nice to honor not only what he did for me, but what he did for the school. I hope the endowment raises the screenwriting image within the industry and helps individuals make some great movies.”
Colleary has taught screenwriting off and on at UCLA since 1995. Since his first writing job with B-movie king Roger Corman, he’s worked at Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount, DreamWorks, Sony and Universal. In addition to his motion picture screenplays, his TV credits include Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Darkman III and Bump in the Night.
Colleary’s graduate seminars are run “as if it were a typical screenwriter development deal,” with the eight students (selected from 20–30 applicants) working out of Colleary and Werb’s West Hollywood office. “Students write individual screenplays in 10 weeks and contribute to the work of the others,” he says. “The strength of the program is that you have a safe place for a free exchange of ideas.”
In addition to supporting Colleary’s work, part of the Hunter/Zakin endowment helps to finance the School of Theater, Film and Television’s annual Screenwriting Showcase, in which five students spend five weeks to cast, rehearse and present a 15-minute stage-reading excerpt from their film.
“It’s a big event,” Colleary says. “We get a big industry audience. A lot of careers have been launched from this program.”
Having a chair, Colleary says, brings some much-needed cachet to screenwriting. “When I tell people I am the chair, they take more notice,” he says with a smile. “People take you more seriously.”
