PROFESSORSHIPS AND RELATED ENDOWMENTS
A gift to the University of Michigan Medical School to establish a named endowment provides income to the Medical School in perpetuity. Such a gift is a wonderful way to ensure the Medical School’s continued excellence and stature for many years into the future. It is a meaningful way to have your name, or that of another family member, friend, or perhaps former teacher or mentor, associated in perpetuity with the University of Michigan Medical School.
Gift opportunities to name an endowment to advance medicine at Michigan through faculty support include the following:
Deanship
$5 million or more
An endowed deanship carries special prestige for both the holder of the position and the individual whose name, through the gift of an endowment, is associated with the position in perpetuity. As with other endowed faculty positions, an endowment to support the deanship provides financial enhancements that allow the School to attract top candidates to the position in a highly competitive environment and provides the dean with discretionary funds for his or her own research, travel and other initiatives.
Professorship
$2 million or more
An endowed professorship is one of the most significant means by which the Medical School can honor its highly esteemed teachers and researchers. An important factor in the retention of top faculty, an endowed professorship also provides the dean and department heads with an extraordinary advantage when competing with peer institutions to attract to the University of Michigan Medical School leading scholars in their fields.
Term-of-Years Professorship
$500,000 ($100,000 per year for five years)
When resources are not immediately available to endow a full professorship in the Medical School, a term-of-years professorship provides an opportunity to provide the same level of faculty support for an outstanding individual, but on an annual basis. A permanently endowed $2 million professorship generates about $100,000 (five percent) in annual distributions the first year. A term-of-years professorship, by providing an annual cash gift of $100,000, in effect provides the same level of support as a permanently endowed professorship but for a limited period of time – five years. (The term can be extended if the benefactor wishes to renew support for additional years.) If the benefactor is eventually able to fully and permanently endow the professorship, the term-of-years professorship can be converted to the fully endowed professorship. As with a permanent endowment, the term-of-years professorship can be named for the benefactor or for anyone else the benefactor may wish to honor.
Visiting Professorship
$1.5 million or more
Visiting professors, whose stay in the Medical School may be as short as one month or as long as a full academic year, bring with them experiences and viewpoints that greatly enrich the academic environment in the Medical School. Chosen from among the world’s most distinguished scholars, they offer students and faculty opportunities for intellectual growth that would not be otherwise possible.
Research Professorship
$1 million or more
A research professorship provides financial support for a tenured member of the faculty so that he or she may concentrate fully for a time on a major research initiative or be able to complete a book or major paper describing research that has been completed. For a benefactor with a strong interest in a particular field, the endowment of a research professorship is a means of furthering the advancement of knowledge in the field.
Early Career Professorship
$1 million or more
Endowed professorships for assistant and associate professors are a means of recognizing the promise of a junior faculty member. Such support at an early stage in the career of a young faculty member may promote great scholarly productivity, in both teaching and research, at a time when the person still has many years to take advantage of further developments in a field.
Collegiate Professorship
$500,000 or more
An endowed collegiate professorship is always named for a onetime member of the Medical School faculty, and is designed to honor both the person for whom it is named and the tenured faculty member whose career contributions are also being recognized by appointment to the professorship.
A collegiate professorship can only be created with gifts from a group of donors. It cannot be established by a single donor, but one person may make a leadership gift that constitutes a significant portion of the $500,000 minimum gift amount.
Visiting Lectureship
$100,000 or more
Endowed lectureships provide departments or centers with the funds needed to bring individuals who are doing some of the most promising or noteworthy work in a field to the Medical School to talk with faculty, students and the public. The visiting lectureship covers the costs of their stay, including travel and housing.
Research Program
$1 million
An endowment to support a research program is designed to provide significant, long-term support for research in a major area of study or on a particular disease. Such an endowment is managed by the dean, a director of a center or a department chair. Generally, research grants awarded from such an endowment are peer-reviewed.
Research Funds
$100,000 or more
Endowed research funds answer a number of important research needs, providing “seed money” for high-risk new initiatives, as well as funds for special equipment and supplies and technical support of various kinds. Especially in the early stages of research, when more traditional sources of funding may not yet be available, funds generated from endowments established by private gifts offer an extremely important source of support.