A gift from the U of T’s chancellor will create the largest humanities and social science endowment at any Canadian university.

Henry Jackman donated $15 million to the university. The money will be double-matched by the administration and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to create a $45 million fund.

The money will be used to hire senior professors, aid graduate students, create more research sabbaticals for profs, and increase the amount of public lectures and outreach programmes in the department.

“I think that this is a fabulous gift,” said Carl Amhrein, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “This is a major, major endowment.”

The gift will let the department create a Chancellor Jackman Distinguished Professor in Philosophical Studies. Dr. James Tully, from the University of Victoria, will be the first scholar to occupy the position.

The donation will also fund at least 11 Jackman Professorships in the Arts, worth $3 million each. The number of teaching positions will be increased “if the stock market performs better,” Amhrein added.

“The key thing, the bigger part of this is it allows the university to hire senior people,” Jackman said. The Jackman Professorships will be “geared to attracting people with 10 years’ experience or more,” he added.

As well as hiring senior professors, the donation will create at least three fellowships for graduate students in the humanities – each worth $25,000 per year.

“The Graduate Student Union (GSU) is pleased that the chancellor is increasing the commitment to the humanities, which have been traditionally underfunded at the U of T,” said GSU vice president internal James Pencharz.

But the donation “is not the be-all and end-all of graduate funding,” he added, noting that the problem of graduate student underfunding cannot be solved by establishing just three fellowships.

As well as hiring rising academic stars and funding graduate students, the money will also be used to create eight research fellowships for current U of T profs who would like to take six-month research sabbaticals.

Finally, the donation will pay for a series of guest lectures and symposiums.

At a Governing Council meeting announcing the donation, Jackman criticized the Faculty of Law’s controversial Raising Our Sights plan, a blueprint for radical reforms of the U of T’s law school that proposes to increase tuition to $22,000 per year by 2005. Jackman cautioned that high tuition might mean law grads would pass up lower-paying jobs, such as working in legal clinics, because the cost of their education would drive them into high-salaried jobs that would allow them to pay off their student loans faster.

“There is a correlation between the level of fees that students pay and what they earn when they graduate,” Jackman said. “You mustn’t be hypocritical about it.”

He added that he is pleased that the law school is trying to increase the quality of its programme by making more money available to attract higher-quality faculty.

“The fact that the law school can do this is a tribute to them,” Jackman said.