By Scott Powers
Orlando Sentinel Staff Writer
 It may be hard for many people at Rollins College to recall a time when Barbara Carson was not a part of the English department or to imagine the day she won't be.
So, awarding her more job incentives, in the form of an endowed college professor's chair, might look to some people like a $1 million folly.
But, in effect, the award is part of an at least initially successful strategy by the Winter Park college to safeguard its future in an increasingly competitive battle for student market share.
In an effort to compete in an ever-changing academic environment, the liberal arts college of 1,640 students is betting its future on being able to keep together a nucleus of 20 to 30 prominent faculty members.
"Rollins knows I'm here for the duration. There is no threat I would go someplace else," said Carson, who has taught English at
the Winter Park college, as a part-time adjunct professor, an assistant professor, an associate professor, a full professor and
now as an endowed professor, since the early 1970s. "I will be carried out of the classroom, probably still clutching my chalk."
When that day comes, Carson might be gone, but Rollins -- with all due respect its award-winning and popular teacher,
researcher and writer -- is hoping not to miss a beat.
The key to the Rollins strategy is that the chairs' endowments allow the college to replace top professors with someone of
similar credentials because the money is available in perpetuity.
Rollins' reputation rose significantly in the past decade as one of the South's better liberal-arts colleges and small, regional
universities, as measured by guidebooks like U.S. News & World Report's annual college edition, and by the school's steadily
rising freshmen entrance test scores.
But maintaining that level is another matter, and Rollins faces a daunting challenge from the calendar. Many of the top faculty
members, whose personal reputations have been like balloons helping to lift the college's image, are getting older.
In October, Rollins wrapped up a $160.2 million fund-raising campaign to pay for new buildings, programs, departments,
scholarships and other wish-list items. While other liberal-arts colleges might have poured nearly all of the donations into bricks
or student financial aid, Rollins President Rita Bornstein and the school's board of trustees decided to spend a big chunk of that
money on the faculty.
They encouraged donors to support an aggressive strategy to reward -- and lock in -- as many top professors as possible, by
giving them the ultimate honor in academia: endowed chairs. The chairs each are full professor jobs backed by endowments of
$1 million or more to assure that certain levels of money and prestige will always be available for the position no matter who
occupies it.
"What we're looking for is to significantly improve the quality of the college and to extend its reputation for quality. And it
seemed obvious to us that one very good index of a high-quality faculty is the number of endowed chairs you have and can use
to reward and retain the outstanding faculty you have, or go out and attract some of the best in the country," Bornstein said.
Carson's position, called the Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Chair of English, thanks to a gift from that couple,
is one of 14 professorships that Rollins has promoted to endowed chairs in the past seven years. That gives the college 23
endowed chairs among 175 professors' jobs.
Rollins still is behind a handful of highly endowed schools, such as the University of Richmond (Va.), which has 39 endowed
chairs among 250 professors. But, by and large, Rollins has climbed ahead of the most prestigious, comparably sized
liberal-arts colleges in the South, such as Furman University in Greenville, S.C., Trinity University in San Antonio, or the
University of the South, in Sewanee, Tenn.
The University of Central Florida, by comparison, has 12 endowed chairs sprinkled through a faculty almost five times as large
as Rollins'.
At Rollins now, one of every eight full-time professors has an endowed chair, with more in the works.
"That's really remarkable," said John Stohlton, executive director of the American Association of Independent College and
University Presidents. "It's a well-thought-through strategy. If you have the resources and the money, that's what faculty look
for. You can attract senior faculty. There are a number of universities that try to do that. The Ivy League universities do that.
They have the financial support to bring in senior faculty. It's harder to do for the smaller colleges."
Yet an urgency is building.
Rollins' dilemma is one facing all of higher education as the 21st century opens, but especially midlevel private colleges. Growth
in higher education was phenomenal in the 1960s and early 1970s because of the Vietnam War, the GI Bill and the economic
evolution that suddenly demanded college degrees for everyone. Colleges everywhere expanded, and many small, liberal-arts
colleges like Rollins doubled to absorb student demand. That meant doubling their faculty.
Thirty years later, all those new professors have bubbled to the top. They are now the senior faculty. But the bubble is about to
pop, because many of them at Rollins and most other colleges are about to retire. And those who don't will find rapidly
increasing demand for their talent and experience.
How can schools like Rollins keep top professors motivated to work harder, teach better and think deeper? How to keep them
from leaving prematurely? How to make sure their talent level and dedication are matched by successors? How to make
people believe that the college really is more than a sum of best current generation of professors?
"We are going to be beautifully positioned, because we have these endowed chairs, so when we need to go out and recruit for
the very best, accomplished scholar-teachers in the country, this gives us a real competitive advantage," Bornstein said.
So far, almost all of Rollins' newly endowed chairs have gone to professors who were already on the college's faculty.
"This is an extraordinary faculty," Bornstein said. "The reputation that the college has earned over the years rests almost entirely
on the work of the faculty. That has not been sufficiently recognized, nor rewarded, so we have been trying to make
adjustments to compensations and benefit, and to provide increased support for sabbaticals for research, for study and for
travel, and for the pinnacle of all rewards, the endowed chairs."
Bornstein acknowledged that she risks losing some of her top professors to competing colleges as talent and experience
become harder for everyone to find. And sometimes the endowments are enticements for professors to consider postponing
retirement.
"I agreed to stay longer at Rollins. I'm getting close to retirement," said Linda DeTure, an education professor who said it was
her life mission to teach elementary school teachers to teach science. Rollins awarded her the Richard James Mertz Chair of
Education last fall. "My husband retired this year. We're living in different cities. We've been commuting for some time. I was
thinking of leaving. But because of the chair, I am able to do some things I haven't been able to do in a while, and I'm just going
to enjoy it."
Theater professor Joseph Nassif, who has directed Rollins' theater arts and dance department for 20 years, said he also
thought about retiring soon. But when he was awarded the Winifred M. Warden Chair in Theatre Arts and Dance in 2000, he
decided not only to stay but to look for ways to work even more.
"Every endowed chair has a responsibility. It fires. It triggers. It fuels that person. It accelerates the academy," Nassif said. "An
endowed chair isn't just a gratuity. If it is, you're giving it to the wrong person. It has to be given to someone who uses it as a
stimulus.
"That worries me," Nassif said. "Because now, I've got to find that 5th gear. I've got to shift into that 5th gear. At my age (63)
after 20 years, it's going to be tougher."
Unique among Rollins' newly-endowed chairs is one for Bornstein, announced in October in what she insisted was a complete
surprise. A $10 million gift created the Harriet W. Cornell Memorial Chair of Distinguished Presidential Leadership, the first
endowed chair for a college president in the country. Bornstein and all her successors may get about $50,000 a year in
discretionary funds.
Donors gifts can help build new classroom buildings, new sports facilities or new student service centers. They can endow
scholarships. They can fund academic programs ranging from science experiments to student travel. It takes a minimum of $1
million to endow a professor's chair.
Bornstein and other Rollins administrators insist they struck a balance. Rollins put almost $27 million from the campaign into
scholarship endowments and is spending another $41 million on bricks and mortar. The total from the campaign going into
faculty endowments: almost $24 million.
Most also agree with Nassif's contention that they feel pressure - from themselves but also from the administration -- to find
ways to work harder, teach better, research more and become better, all-around professors.
In the fall, chemistry professor Erich Blossey, who had been at Rollins for 37 years, was awarded the D.J. and J.M. Cram
Chair of Chemistry. Now he believes he must live up to the name: Donald Cram, a 1941 Rollins graduate who died last
summer, won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1987.
"What this does is raise the expectations for me," Blossey said. "I think the general thing is more of a leadership role. The
scholarship, I think we're all interested in our fields and we want to do that. We also want to be good teachers. But I think in
addition to that the chairs, for most of us, have added, let's say, a more visible responsibility for leadership."
At Rollins the chairs typically include salary increases in the neighborhood of $5,000 per year. The professors say their real
appeal, though, is in prestige, recognition, job freedom and discretionary money for research, travel and other expenses.
And those create outside opportunities -- and consequently marketing opportunities for the college. Endowed professors are
typically in more demand at national and international conferences, and their research grant applications and publication queries
tend to get warmer receptions.
DeTure parlayed her new chair quickly into a research conference in Panama this month. Philosophy professor Hoyt Edge,
awarded the Hugh F. and Jeannette G. McKean Chair in 1997, recalled, "I immediately applied afterwards for an external
grant. I think the fact that I could list that I was an endowed professor helped in the success of that grant."
But what can endowed chairs do for students? Would most students even care?
Some might notice the title and have higher expectations. Others, such as DeTure's student Kathryn Cypherd, a senior from
Orlando studying to be an elementary science teacher, say they benefit immediately from materials the professor is able to
obtain and opportunities they can create with a name.
But most students probably care less about professors' titles than word-of-mouth opinions of other students. And one of the
primary benefits of an endowed chair is that the professors are relieved from teaching as many classes. So fewer students will
take their courses. Traditionally, endowed chairs have been the tool of research universities, freeing professors from
classrooms. For liberal-arts schools, the purpose gets grayer.
"The expectation in each case is that the person should be able to excel in teaching, scholarship and in service capacities," said
Provost James Malek, who is in charge of the faculty. "We're trying to find people who are good at all three."
Carson's primary expertise is in Southern women's literature, but she also has done some nationally recognized research into
what students think of their professors. What makes professors happy will make students happy, she argues.
"Students always benefit when faculty members grow," Carson said. "To the extent that this challenges us to be our best, I think
the students are bound to benefit."
Ultimately, Carson noted, the professor has freedom to mold the endowed chair position into whatever he or she wants. At
schools like Rollins, few, if any professors, value research over teaching.
"If I had my druthers, I would love to see this primarily as a teaching chair, for someone who is active in scholarship, who
publishes, but who is known for making a difference in students' lives," she said.
Scott Powers can be reached at spowers@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5441.
Copyright © 2002, Orlando Sentinel
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