Marcus Aurelius funded the first endowed professorships in AD 176
In AD 176 the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius paid for permanent teaching chairs in Athens, one each for the Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoic and Epicurean schools. The idea behind them, a fund that pays out yearly while its core stays intact, now underpins universities, museums and the world's richest foundations.
An endowment is a legal structure for holding money, property or investments for a purpose chosen by its founders, often forever. The usual rule is to keep the inflation-adjusted principal, called the corpus, untouched and spend a prudent slice each year. Donors can tie the income to specific ends, such as a professorship in one subject or, in some places, a trust solely for a pet. Spending against those wishes is called invading the endowment, though courts can redirect a gift under the cy-près doctrine when the original aim becomes impossible. American law sorts funds into restricted, quasi, term and unrestricted types, while British charities distinguish permanent from expendable endowments.
Islamic law developed a close parallel, the waqf, in which land, buildings or other assets are given for religious or charitable use with no intention of taking them back. The oldest dated deed, from 876, concerns a multi-volume Qur'an and is kept in Istanbul. Egypt's earliest known waqf, founded in 919, was a pond called Birkat Ḥabash with orchards whose income ran a hydraulic complex and fed the poor. Endowed madrasas are thought to have inspired Europe's endowed colleges from the thirteenth century, with notable similarities between waqf deeds and the statutes of Merton College, Oxford.
Medieval Europe used endowments for chantries, where prayers were said for the dead, and for great foundations like Reading Abbey, established by Henry I after his son died in the White Ship disaster. Alfonso VIII of Castile endowed professorships in 1212 for an ill-fated university at Palencia, and Britain's first endowed chair, the Regius Professor of Medicine at Aberdeen, dates from 1497.
The sums today are enormous. Endowing a chair at a major research university typically costs between $1 million and $5 million. Harvard's endowment, worth $53.2 billion in June 2021, is the largest academic fund anywhere, and at the end of 2022 the Novo Nordisk Foundation held $167 billion.
Source: Financial endowment
