Dictionary

regius professor en · NOUN

Etymology

Learned borrowing from Latin rēgius professor.

Meanings

1. A professor who holds a position created by or filled by a royal patron.
   • For very good reasons, the College professors were keen to exclude the new regius professors - who often received a mere £50 per year from the Crown - from a share in the College revenue, and so men like the chemist Thomas Thomson and the engineer Lewis Gordon (unlike the five older regius professors of astronomy, church history, civil law, medicine, and anatomy) were without administrative and academic power in the Glasgow institution. 1989, Crosbie Smith, M. Norton Wise, Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin, →ISBN, page 27:
   • In Oxford there are some forty professors, of whom seven or eight are regius professors appointed by the Crown, and paid by revenues derived from the Crown. 1874, Report: Ordered by the House of Assembly to be Printed, page 16:
   • All doctors, in whatever faculty, were called likewise professores, and possessed and equal capacity to claim and occupy the chair (cathedra) on solemn inceptions and other occasions; this privilege was first restricted, by the Elizabethan statutes, to the three regii professores. 1841, George Peacock, Observations on the Statutes of the University of Cambridge, London: John W. Parker. Cambridge: J. and J. J. Deighton, page 34:
   • Sir Henry Acland, regius professor from 1857 to 1895, fought a series of good and largely successful fights to develop biological sciences at the university, overcoming the objections of anti-Darwinians, antivivisectionists, and others committed to tranquil inertia. 2002, Michael Bliss, William Osler: A Life in Medicine, →ISBN, page 310:

Forms