Noam Chomsky Student Support Endowment
Honor Noam Chomsky by Supporting Students
Noam Chomsky’s devotion to both graduate and undergraduate students has always been a feature of his professional life. We are pleased to announce a new fund in his honor, carrying forward the work he has led.
This new fund will:
- support the next generations of scholars, who will carry Chomsky’s work further, building an ever more complete understanding of what it is to be human.
- support graduate and undergraduate students in Linguistics and related fields through scholarships, special lectures, and potentially an endowed professorship in the future.
Please give to support the creation of the Noam Chomsky Student Endowment in Linguistics to help continue his impact on students. The goal is to endow the fund at the required amount of $50,000 within five years. If the goal is not reached the funds raised will be expended with the same intention to support students majoring in Linguistics or related fields.
World Renowned Linguist and Public Intellectual
This fund honors Noam Chomsky, the founder of modern Linguistics, as well as the best-known public intellectual of recent times. In his 55 years as a Professor of Linguistics, he gave weekly lectures, propelling the field forward with new ideas.
In his broad career, Chomsky has been an inventive analyst non pareil. This has had two consistent applications: deep socio-political commentary, and equally deep analysis of language and the human mind as a branch of science. In this work, he gave a fresh look into the hidden structures of language, modelling them with ever more sophisticated theoretical structure, ultimately leading to a bridge across many areas of human thought, and potential integration with today’s biological and genetic theories. His lasting scientific contribution may be to give a fruitful basis for present and future understanding of what it is that makes Homo Sapiens unique.
Chomsky’s launched the cognitive revolution in linguistics in the 1950s and guided the field forward for the next 65 years. In his more than 30 books on language he set a continually evolving agenda for the discipline that provided revolutionary insights that have revolutionized the field.
Impact at the University of Arizona
After retiring from MIT two decades ago, Chomsky joined the University of Arizona in 2017 as a Laureate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Agnese Nelms Haury Chair. He had a burst of creative activity, bringing his research program to a critical new culmination, which has reshaped the theory of language into a form consistent with the classic models of natural science.
At Arizona, Chomsky re-awakened his active role as a teacher of undergraduate and graduate students. He met with students as before, and joined several colleagues in an annual linguistics course, open to all students, and to members of the local and national community, even a few local high school students.
He presented his new ideas, substantially simplifying the theory of language and how it is situated structurally as a part of human knowledge and behavior. This reduced the elaborate models he and students had constructed to a very small set of formalized processes – a classic example of how reduction to simple principles reveals a scientific advance. This achievement is stimulating new approaches to connecting human cognition to human physiology, social discourse, evolution, and most important, natural laws governing the structure and expression of computations of all forms, human, animal and artificial.
Extending Chomsky’s Legacy
Chomsky’s research impact extends beyond syntactic theory. He provided foundational concepts in cognitive science and computer science. He has 43 honorary doctorates from institutions around the world and he has won a huge number of awards, including the Carl Linnaeus Medal in Sweden, the Ulysses Medal, the Leonard Euler Medal the Kyoto Prize from Japan, The Merton center for peace and justice award and many others.
It’s hard to imagine a more important scholar in our discipline than Noam Chomsky. Please help us extend his legacy further by helping fund this student scholarship in his name.