The Harvard Crimson reports that “Harvard is quietly asking donors for $10 million gifts to establish new endowed professorships in a sweeping bid to reshape its faculty under the banner of ‘viewpoint diversity.’” If so, it’s an initiative that would improve Harvard. But it sure is a big-budget one. Interested donors should do some comparison shopping.

Harvard’s gonna be the gold-plated option, no matter what, but even so, $10 million for an endowed professorship is a stiff price. Stanford Medicine says an endowed professorship goes for just $6 million. Duke University lists a range of endowment levels, including $3.5 million to endow a full professor and $2 million to endow an assistant or associate professor. Augustana University says, “A minimum of $1 million is required to establish an endowed chair, professorship or department.” The University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas) offers the best bargains detectable by a quick web-search: $3 million to endow a Distinguished Chair, $2 million to endow a Chair, $1 million to endow a Distinguished Professorship, and just $500,000 to endow a Professorship.

Donors interested in viewpoint diversity might get 20 professors at UT Dallas for the same price as one professor at Harvard. Even if Harvard would accept a mere $6 million to endow a professorship, at cut-rate Stanford prices, you could still get 10 professors at UT Dallas for one at Harvard. Quantity, a donor might think, has a quality all its own.

Now, all these different endowment professorships, like all the different universities in America, have different functions in the university ecosystem. UT Dallas and its peers are either for academic high-flyers early in their careers or for people who will never be high-flyers. Harvard is—or should be, when it is not handing out $900,000 per annum professorships as sinecures to plagiarists such as ex-president Claudine Gay—the reward for those who have proven their chops and now get the prestige and the money. Harvard does need to charge more to endow professorships than does UT Dallas. And even if Harvard is a place for those who did their best work when much younger, at UT Dallas and its peers, the dream of snagging an endowed professorship at Harvard is what spurs so many junior faculty at America’s UT Dallases to burn the midnight oil. Ambitious lieutenants similarly strive for our nation’s defense, with an eye to one day getting on to the Board of Directors at Lockheed Martin.

But the point of these rumored endowed professorships at Harvard is to promote “viewpoint diversity,” and the ecosystem for the professors to get hired does not fit the Harvard endowment model. Who will Harvard hire from? The academic left has been purging everyone to the right of Robespierre for two generations and more now. There are hardly any junior professors left at the UT Dallases whom Harvard could hire. Sheerly as a question of sequencing, American philanthropists would be better off endowing 20 professorships at UT Dallas and its peers now, endowing five professorships at Duke in 10 years, and endowing one professorship at Harvard in 20 years. We need 20 assistant professors now; one distinguished full professor can come in time.

Then, too, any endowed professor that Harvard hires for “viewpoint diversity” now is likely to be a silver-haired, old-school liberal, who is a touch disturbed at how radical the younger faculty have become. As for actual conservatives, Harvard is more likely to hire someone of Steven Pinker’s views than of Patrick Deneen’s. And even if they were to hire Deneen away from Notre Dame, this would be window dressing. Harvard needs to change its regular hiring patterns so that the assistant and associate professors it hires on its own dime include a steady and healthy proportion of young Deneens.

If Harvard doesn’t change its regular hiring processes, it isn’t serious about “viewpoint diversity.” And all these endowed professorships will be a new Harvard marketing scheme for gullible donors.

Donors considering giving money to Harvard should ask some pointed questions about Harvard’s regular hiring processes—and get satisfactory evidence that those hiring processes have changed before they open their wallets. And they should take a visit to Dallas to scout out some cheaper alternatives.

It’s a good deal: with the money they save on a UT Dallas endowed professorship, they could splurge on a visit to Neiman Marcus’ diamonds counter. Take some advice from Marilyn Monroe:

A prof at the Charles
Is a thing you can boast of
But diamonds are the donor’s friend.

Getting viewpoint diversity back in Harvard is chancy at best. Get the tenure and tiara package in Dallas. Diamonds last.

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