Chair (official)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For other uses of "chair", see chair (disambiguation).
A chair or "seat" is a seat of office, authority, or dignity, such as a professorship at a college or university.
Chair (and chairperson) are sometimes used, predominantly in the UK public sector as gender-neutral terms, to describe the position of the person which chairs a committee, with chairman or chairwoman denoting the gender of an incumbent. While chairperson dates from the 1970s, the use of chair (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) to refer to someone in charge of a meeting dates from as early as 1658.
Chairs at academic institutions are often named after the person who donated the money to support the position. Such a chair often comes with guaranteed funding, which makes them highly coveted. A given school, especially an older and well financed one, may have many such chairs. See, for example, the list of Professorships at the University of Cambridge.
Some of the best known examples are the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University and the Quain Chair of Jurisprudence at University College London, both in England. This former chair was held by Isaac Newton, Charles Babbage, Paul Dirac, and Stephen Hawking, and the later was held by John Austin, H.L.A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin among others.
