MARLBORO — Marlboro College recently announced the completion of funding for the Luis C. Batlle Chair in Music, the first fully endowed chair at the college.
The chair serves as a tribute to longtime music faculty member and Marlboro Music School and Festival mentor Luis Batlle, who retired in 2010.
“We are thrilled to have the Luis Batlle Chair fully funded, with the generous help of many dear friends and supporters,” said president Ellen McCulloch-Lovell. “Luis is an exemplary teacher and musician, and has been a vital link between the college and Marlboro Music for more than 30 years.”
The chair endowment reached the full amount of $1.4 million in February 2015, thanks to a generous final anonymous donation of $650,000. A total of 34 donors have contributed more than $1.2 million over a period of 13 years, with an additional $200,000 in earnings.
They include a $50,000 donation from the Alexander Schneider Foundation, which commemorates the eminent violinist and fellow Marlboro Music mentor Sasha Schneider.
The Luis Batlle Chair fund will remain permanently restricted, with only the annual income being applied to defray the salary of an honored music faculty member. Longtime music professor Stan Charkey is the current holder of Marlboro's first endowed chair.
“It is indeed a great privilege to be awarded the first fully endowed chair at Marlboro,” said Charkey, who has been teaching music at the college since 1977. “Luis was my esteemed colleague on the music faculty for so many years, so this means a lot to me. It is fantastic that there is now a guaranteed chair in music, and I intend to carry on the Western art tradition for which Luis is known, for years to come.”
The endowed chair is also a significant response to supporting academic programs at Marlboro. Other endowed chair funds that have been initiated, and which await complete funding, include: the Lillian Farber Chair in Technology and the Liberal Arts; the Walter and Flora Bishop Hendricks Chair in English Literature, Poetry, and Creative Writing; the Roland W. Boyden Chair in History and Philosophy; and the Christian A. Johnson Chair in Visual Arts.