It costs a few million to create an endowed chair, and these funds can only be used to help offset salary costs for that professor (thus helping with the budget for the department) and for research associated with that professor. You can't just use all of the money in these endowed chairs for other things that people in this thread are suggesting, it's not fungible.
You know, folks on HN often re-post links to Chesterton's Fence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...), about trying to understand how things are done and why, before tearing things down and potentially causing more problems. I'd highly suggest the folks in this thread that are exhibiting a lot of anger about academia keep Chesterton's Fence in mind. Yes, academia has problems (as do all human institutions and organizations), but the amount of good academia offers is quite vast in terms of advances in science, arts, education, public discourse, startups, and more.
I mean, the initial post in this thread is just completely ignorant. Expecting a university to blow their endowment on a short-term[0] political issue is just ignorant. They spend maybe 5% of their endowment each year, because that is the safe amount to spend, as they want to be able to pull that 5% out, every year, essentially forever. Two minutes of "research" on university endowments would surface this kind of information.
[0] Four or even eight years is nothing to an institution that is older than the United States itself.
A $20 billion endowment at a 5% ROI is $1 billion per year
Even that portion is also restricted. The purpose must be strictly academic and some part must be paid to the university, some must be reinvested, and then the final pieces can be used at the professor's discretion according to the rules set when the endowment is established.
So generally, you are looking at 1-2% of the total amount that can be spent annually. Still a lot, but for research, tens of millions would still not be enough for something like Penn.
