On Tuesday, the Stephen W. Hawking professorship of cosmology was established by the Regent House by 746 votes to 606.

As a result, the university will accept a $6 million donation by the Avery-Tsui Foundation, set up by Hawking’s late friend Dennis Avery, to fund the new post. The terms of the donation allocate $2 million for the “core endowment for the professorship”, while the remaining $4 million will be used to fund an additional salary payment up to £67,000.

The approval of the professorship is likely to stir debate, and the close vote suggests that the issue has already divided opinion across the university’s governing body. Critics of the donation have argued that the post will offer double the basic salary of Cambridge professors, which they see a threat to meritocracy. Others fear that it will lead to donors increasingly asserting their influence over pay within the university.

Adam Hill, a first year MML student, said, “With the cache of Stephen Hawking’s name attached to the professorship, there surely will be no need for this exorbitant salary to attract academics to the role.

"What is more, this decision flies in the face of the Fair Pay Campus campaign, which aims to keep pay ratios at a 10:1 limit – an increasingly difficult task if donors can chose to set unnecessarily high salaries like this one.”

Other recent examples of close donor influence include the renaming of New Hall to Murray Edwards College in 2008, following a £30m donation by alumna Ros Edwards and her husband Steve Edwards.

The University’s Communications office issued the following statement: “The University's democratic process, through its self-governing body of academics, the Regent House, has approved the creation of the Stephen W. Hawking Professorship of Cosmology which, thanks to the generous gift from the Avery-Tsui Foundation, will be duly created on 1 March 2014 as a way of maintaining Professor Hawking's scholarly legacy.”