Professorship at Lund University

Abstract

Before 1960’s professorships were very rare in Sweden. Generally, at each department/division there was only a single chair and the chair holder was automatically the head of the department. Thus professors came in succession, one at a time per department. Källén’s exceptional scientific merits quickly convinced several scientists that Sweden can’t afford to lose him, just because there happened to be no vacancies for him to occupy. But how was one to achieve this goal? Ivar Waller and Torsten Gustafson, introduced earlier in Chap. 3, (as well as a few more people, according to Gustafson) came up with a bright idea, i.e., to try to create a personal professorship for Källén. Written documents show [1] that such a proposal had to pass several hurdles and at the very end it had to be approved by the Swedish Parliament for budgetary reasons.