It was early October when Jason Swarts, the English department head, first learned that thanks to a restriction passed by the state legislature in its budget bill, distinguished professorships, which were previously given regardless of area of study, were now restricted to STEM fields.
According to the Office of Faculty Excellence, a distinguished professorship “honors a current or potential tenured professor who has achieved recognition well above the criteria for the rank of professor and be considered one of the best scholars in the discipline.”
To Swarts, a distinguished professorship means much more than simply recognition from the University.
“It’s a way of honoring and respecting the contributions of our most productive and well-known scholars to the University,” Swarts said. “I think it means a lot for recruiting. I think it means a lot to the standing of our graduate and undergraduate programs, to prospective students, to donors, to public scholars and other scholars who would want to interact with faculty and students who go here.”
There are two types of distinguished professorships — a named distinguished professorship and an unnamed distinguished professorship. Named distinguished professors receive funding, while unnamed distinguished professors do not.
While those outside of STEM fields can continue to receive unnamed distinguished professorships, they cannot receive named ones, meaning they’re unable to gain funding from distinguished professorships.
For Walt Wolfram, the William C. Friday University endowed chair and a professor in English at NC State, his distinguished professorship has opened many research and teaching opportunities that he would otherwise be unable to pursue.
“It gave me discretionary funds to start projects that I then got funding for, and it also allowed me to take on endeavors that I could never have taken on without the support,” Wolfram said. “For example, every year for the last 30 years, we’ve taught eighth graders on the island of Ocracoke. … It’s the most memorable experience of the students, and it’s transformed their entire view of language and their own language on the island of Ocracoke over 30 years.”
Without the funding given by named distinguished professorships like the William C. Friday endowment, these pursuits would be impossible, Wolfram said.
“We’re the only ones who have this sort of extensive outreach in terms of our engagement with communities, thanks to the funding from the William C. Friday endowment,” Wolfram said.
To be unable to gain this sort of funding is disappointing, Swarts said.
“It’s sort of like there’s less room to innovate and to grow something new to make new areas or publicity or to make new areas for focal points for research and for recruitment that we had before,” Swarts said.
Swarts said this decision also affects how he can recognize his colleagues.
“It means that I can’t really honor some of my colleagues in a way that I think that their research efforts really warrant,” Swarts said. “I would like to be able to find new areas of scholarship that come up as our field evolves that would warrant the case for new named professorships.”
Those with named distinguished professorships will continue to be funded, though this decision cuts the ability for NC State to have new funded distinguished professors in these areas.
Wolfram said this decision is antithetical to NC State’s goals in terms of interdisciplinary work and research.
“It’s also an academic embarrassment in terms of this sort of trivial classification of things into STEM programs and non-STEM programs,” Wolfram said. “It’s a sort of violation of what we’ve been doing for the last 20 years to promote intersectionality. And the fact that STEM people work with humanities to look at the critical ethical dimensions of their work, and so forth, their historical context and all those things. And so everything about it is sort of anti-academic.”
To not have access to this sort of funding would be a dealbreaker for recruiting top talent at NC State, Wolfram said.
“I would never come here if they didn’t have a distinguished professorship in the humanities,” Wolfram said, “I mean, I came because I got a good deal and was allowed to do what I love to do, which is entrepreneurial kinds of programs that work and so forth, but I would never have come.”
