Alumnus endows College professorship

Through a gift in his will, Raymond Kjellberg (A.B.'47, S.B.'49, M.D.'52), has honored his own intellectual heritage and the man he viewed as embodying that ideal by establishing the Benjamin Franklin Professorship in the College.

In creating a College professorship, Dr. Kjellberg's intention was to honor a distinguished scholar and teacher with a deep and long-standing commitment to the College's general-education programs, said John Boyer, Dean of the College. The Benjamin Franklin Professorship is the 12th named chair in the College.

"While Dr. Kjellberg saw his medical degree as providing him with the career and the means to make a gift of this magnitude, he saw his College degrees as defining the kind of person he became," Boyer said. "He felt that the College provided him with an interdisciplinary capacity to explore many domains of knowledge."

Kjellberg was a great admirer of Franklin, the American statesman and philosopher renowned for his breadth of work in science and the humanities.

Kjellberg, the son of a Chicago pipe fitter, attended the University during the Hutchins era and went on to become a distinguished neurosurgeon in Boston. He died in 1993.

In choosing to name the professorship for Franklin, Kjellberg wanted to exemplify the value of broad human knowledge and to make a statement about Franklin's impact on America and the world.

"We will identify a faculty member who lives up to that ideal, someone with a wide range of scholarly interests and a record of distinction as an educator," Boyer said.