Two professorships established at LSUS 08/28/02

Dr. E. Joseph Savoie, Louisiana commissioner of higher education, presented two $40,000 checks representing the state Board of Regents’ matching funds for two endowed professorships at LSUS.

The Regents provided the 40 percent match for the George A. Khoury Professorship in American Humanics in the College of Liberal Arts, and the Dr. Richard K. Speairs Professorship in Field Biology in the College of Sciences. The professorships are now fully endowed at $100,000 each.

The Khoury Professorship, whose donor is George A. Khoury Jr., will support the efforts of a professor in American Humanics and Nonprofit Administration, particularly in the LSUS Master of Science in Human Services Administration program.

The Speairs Professorship, donated by Dr. Richard K. Speairs, one of the original LSUS faculty members in 1967, has been designated specifically for a field biologist on the LSUS campus.

With the two new ones, LSUS has ten fully endowed professorships and four partially funded professorships.

A major purpose of the endowed professorship program is to create stronger economic development ties between the private sector and higher education. To create endowed professorships, colleges and universities must raise 60 percent of the cost from private sources.

Funding for the Louisiana Education Quality Trust Fund, from which the Board of Regents draws the 40-percent match for professorships, is generated through a permanent trust fund approved by voters in a 1986 constitutional amendment. The trust fund was established with about $550 million received from settlement of disputed oil and gas revenues generated in the so-called 8(g) stipulation of the Federal Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. A quarter of the interest earned from investment of 8(g) oil and gas revenues will continue to be returned to the trust fund until it reaches a cap of $2 billion. As of July 1, 2000, the trust fund had risen to nearly $900 million. Each year, the Legislature appropriates half of the interest earnings to the Board of Regents, the policy-making and coordinating agency for all public higher education in Louisiana, and the other half to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education for grades K-12.