Nominations for Chairs
The latest episode of Mark Tavener’s comedy, High Table Lower Orders, includes a character who has held both the Donald Rumsfeld Chair in Peace Studies and the Bill Clinton Chair in Personal Ethics. (My University has a set of Chairs which are named by the recipients: my fantasy is to hold the Tony Hancock Chair in something, though if push ever came to shove I guess I’d go for C.L.R. James if his executors would let me). Anyway, you can do better than Mark Tavener, surely. Nominations please.
posted on Monday, March 14th, 2005 at 2:30 pm
I’ve always wanted to be rich enough to mock the greed of university administrators in this way. I really really want to set up the Kenneth Williams Professor of Proctology somewhere, just for the pleasure of saying “and we certainly hope that this will be a well-endowed professorship”.
The Pamela Anderson Chair of Biometrics;
The Spike Milligan Chair of Tactical Combat;
The Le Penn School of Comparative Ethnic Culture
The Claude Vorhilon Chair of Exobiology.
The Jeff/Jim Guckert/Gannon Chair in Political/Journalistic Hackery/Excellence
The James Warren Jones Chair of Toxicology.
Why stop at chairs?
Aeron Chair of New Economics
Ottoman of Istanbul (engaged in a long intradepartmental feud with the Ottoman of Armenian Genocide Studies)
Throne of Good Reading
Beach Chair of Light Reading (part of the Physics Faculty)
Hank Williams Barstool of Philosophy
Casting Couch of Gender Studies
Backseat of Adolescent Psychology (alternatively, any donor without sufficient manna to back a well-endowed chair could take a backseat instead)
John Ford Saddle of Cinematography (sometimes confused by newcomers with the John M. Ford Lab Bench of Metaphysical Word Games)
Movable Feast of French Culinary History
Movable Beast of Comparative Evolution
Bleachers of Sabermetrics
Nosebleed Seats of Sports Economics (whose holder confounded everyone by marrying the new holder of Club-Level Seats of Corporate Strength)
Broken Down, Scraped Up, Paint Chipped, Rained On, Taken Out Back But Looked So Bad Even the Garbage Men Turned It Down Chair of Blues Poetics
Guest scholars who have overstayed their welcome could be banished to the Divan of Longueur.
Cheap shot, but: The G.W. Bush Chair in English
The Rupert Murdoch Chair of Language and Communication at Oxford University? … oh, that exists….
ahh I wanted the G.W.Bush chair of rhetoric…but as you say….
The David Horowitz Chair of McCarthy Studies
The Martha Stewart Chair of Ethical Design
The Comfy Chair in Spanish Religious History
The Osama bin Laden Chair of Speleology
The Arnold Schwarzenegger chair of Women’s Studies.
The Strom Thurmond and David Duke chairs of African studies.
The Henry Kissenger chair of Latin American Studies.
The Harry S Truman chair of Utilitarianism (okay, I even cringed while writing that)
The Vladimir Putin chair of Democratic Studies.
The Jonah Goldberg Chair of Knowing Your Subject.
The Dick Cheney Chair of Hermeneutics.
The Philip Morris chair in epidemiology.
It will happen.
The Kenneth Lay chair of Corporate Accounting
The Hannibal Lecter Chair in Vegan Cooking.
About that Ken Lay chair:
http://munews.missouri.edu/Showinterest.cfm?interest_id=546
There’s already a Hraold Holt swimming centre.
A friend of mine was actually in line for a Ken Lay chair, just before the meltdown. He got the job, but they changed the name.
The Kripke chair of Social Graces
This reminds me that H. L. Mencken used to mock the politicians of his day by using their honorary doctorates, as in Dr. Harding, Dr. Coolidge, etc.
Could we have a Mencken Chair of “Letters”?
The Charlton Hestin Chair of Trauma Medicine
The Abraham Lincoln Chair of Southern Culture
The Paris Hilton Chair of Modern Communications Security
tony blair chair of canine studies
Morbidly:
The Thomas A. Edison Chair for Criminal Deterence—or, more obscurely:
The Christopher Pike Chair for Binary Communication.
The Clarence Thomas Chair in Constitutional Theory
The Bernard Kerik Chair in Public Administration
The Richard Nixon Chair in Democratic Values
The Robert Novak Chair in Mimetic Herpetology
The Darl McBride Chair in Patent Law
The Armstrong Williams Chair in Public Accountability
The John Payne Collier Chair in Book History and Literary Detection.
Or how about the Mark Hofmann Chair in Manuscript Studies and Ordinance Engineering?
“The Robert Novak Chair in Mimetic Herpetology”
I think we have a winner.
The Michael Jackson Chair in Identity Theory
The Hugh Hewitt Chair in Blogger Triumphalism
The Glenn Reynolds Chair in Library Science
the samuel walton chair of (inter alia) industrial relations, community relations, workplace relations, gender studies, multicultural studies, antitrust studies and first amendment law.
The George W. Bush Chair in Climate Change
The Dan Rather Chair in Document Forensics
The William Gates Chair in Anti-Trust Law
The Kim-Jong Il Chair in International Relations
Truth may be at least as strange as satire: I just learned that Harvard has a “Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature”….
The Ahmed Abdel Hadi Chalabi Chair of Democratization Studies
Until he moved to UCSD this year Keith Poole held the Kenneth L. Lay chair in political science at the University of Houston. Afaik the chair (endowed by Enron) still exists.
I vote the prize for the “Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature.” I don’t know if it’s so funny because its real or just the idea of someone being officially declared a weary professor.
The Saddam Hussein Chair in Political Analysis.
The Karl Rove Chair in Communication Ethics.
The Albert Gore Chair of Electoral Security Systems.