Within a few short years, NAASR achieved this ambitious goal by establishing the first chair of Armenian Studies at Harvard University in 1959 under the leadership of NAASR’s first three founding members, Manoog S. Young, Thomas T. Amirian, and Arra S. Avakian. Over 1,000 people packed into Harvard’s Memorial Hall and celebrated the successful conclusion of the Harvard Chair campaign at a gala banquet where it was announced that the campaign had exceeded its goal of $300,000. The chair at Harvard was the first professorship to be endowed by a community organization. The second chair in Armenian Studies followed not long afterward at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), due to NAASR’s fundraising efforts, primarily in California.