Talk:Robert Thurman

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[edit] Birthday

Is it October 1932 or August 1941? It says 1932 on IMDb. I didn't see that edit summary by an editor who said he knew him personally when I put 1932, so I've changed it back to 1941. I checked on zabasearch and there is a one Robert A. Thurman born August 3, 1941. --Fallout boy 23:30, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Dash Snow

Added a link to the Dash Snow article, which is tagged as needing to be linked to other articles. Dash Snow is the son of his daughter Maya by his first wife Christophe de Menil. See: http://nymag.com/arts/art/profiles/26288/index5.html Mujokan 15:56, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "Je Tsong Khapa Professor"

The article says "He is the Je Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University." I think this is ambiguous. What exactly is meant by the phrase "Je Tsong Khapa Professor"? Je Tsong Khapa is the name of a man who founded a school of Buddhism. So when we say that Thurman is a "Je Tsong Khapa Professor", does that mean that he's an expert on the life of Je Tsong Khapa? Or is it just an honorary title? (e.g. one might refer to a Nobel-prize-winning chemist as a "Nobel professor", even if that chemist doesn't know much about Alfred Nobel.) Most ordinary people who read this article won't be familiar with either of these usages.

Navigatr85 16:48, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

It's no different from using the name of any other endowed chair, as they're frequently named after individuals. People will probably either know that or skip over "Je Tsong Khapa" without noticing.

Named professorships, by definition, have to be named after someone. They are usually named after a major donor but this is not always the case. The donor(s) who funded the chair Thurman holds at Columbia chose to name it for Je Tsong Khapa. Thurman happens to be quite knowledgeable about Khapa, but such knowledge is not a prerequisite for holding a named chair. After Thurman retires someone else will become the Je Tsong Khapa professor; that person will hae to be an expert on Indo-Tibetan Buddhism but need not be an expert on Khapa in particular.

There are over 400 named chairs at Columbia, and several happen to be named after historical figures. The John Jay Professorship in Greek and Latin, for example, is named after an early alumnus who became the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, yet there is no reason a professor of Greek or Latin would know much about him. Receiving a named chair is an honor, not an obligation.

Named chairs have been around for centuries, so the concept is nothing new. Stephen Hawking, for instance, is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. The Lucasian chair was created in 1663 with funds from Henry Lucas and was held by Isaac Newton in the late 17th century. Newton was the second Lucasian professor, and Hawking is the seventeenth. Other Lucasian professors will follow until Cambridge stops teaching mathematics, which may not happen for thousands of years. Btw, Hawking is probably not an expert on Lucas, and Newton probably wasn't either.

One would not "refer to a Nobel-prize-winning chemist as a 'Nobel professor'" unless he happened to hold a chair that actually was named for Alfred Nobel. I don't believe there are any such chairs anywhere. Horst L. Stormer, a Nobel prize winning physicist, is the I. I. Rabi professor of physics at Columbia; his chair is named after another Nobel laureate who spent most of his life teaching physics at Columbia, but Stormer's expertise is very different from Rabi's and, as far as I know, they never even met.