Why Do Colleges Give Honorary Degrees?
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
Dear George,
Yours is the first honorary degree that I have been offered, and I thank you for considering me for such an honor.
However, I remember the work I did to get a real degree at Princeton and the guys on the same platform receiving honorary degrees without work—and felt an "honorary degree" was a debasement of the idea of a "degree which confirms certain work has been accomplished." It is like giving an "honorary electricians license." I swore then that if by chance I was ever offered one I would not accept it.
Now at last (twenty-five years later) you have given me a chance to carry out my vow.
So thank you, but I do not wish to accept the honorary degree you offered.
Sincerely yours,
Richard P. Feynman
http://stancarey.tumblr.com/post/30867103451/why-richard-fey...
Honestly, it never bothered me at all. It's one thing if you're saying "here, take this honorary degree and go work in a new profession"...but that's not what happens. Honorary degrees are given in an area where the person has already proven themselves successful...so it's really nothing at all like an "honorary electricians license".
I'm sure most colleges would love it if people decided to take the "easy route" and go, be extremely successful in a field, give a bunch of money to the university and get an honorary degree at some point.
Feynman, in this particular instance, is showboating more than anybody who's ever been honored. I've got an undergraduate degree and a masters degree. I worked hard for them. I've worked a hell of a lot harder to be successful in my field and if I get to a point where I've been so successful that I can dole out hundreds of thousands of dollars back to the school that they choose to honor me with another degree I'll appreciate that they thought I was worth recognizing...
But the amount of work involved to "get a degree" or even two degrees is TRIVIAL compared to the amount of work involved in actually being successful. Lots of people have degrees. Lots of people are not overly successful in their careers.
To that end, Feynman is showboating.
And while being successful or making an outstanding contribution is a way to get an honorary degree, it is easier still to just buy one.
So if you are successful, it doesn't matter whether or not you have a degree, so why should anyone care if you do?
>Honorary degrees are given in an area where the person has already proven themselves successful...so it's really nothing at all like an "honorary electricians license".
If you've proven yourself successful, what good is a degree going to do? Prove it again? The only thing an honorary degree can do is bestow trust onto someone who doesn't deserve it. If you already have trust earned through successes (enough to make anyone think you should have a degree,) you certainly don't need a degree to bestow it, do you?
At best, an honorary degree simply says what everyone already knows. At worst, it privileges people who don't deserve it.
...except for her actual undergrad degree, which is from Cornell.
(Hey, when you don't have presidents, you take what you can get. And we'll take RBG over several presidents.)
We're not computers, and we can't fix syntax errors in natural language from context. Not that what he said wasn't clear enough itself.
"Supreme Court member Ruth Bader Ginsburg has an honorary doctorate degree from every single Ivy League School, with the exception of Cornell, which doesn’t give them out."
It doesn't seem unreasonable to point out that an earned undergraduate degree is significantly different from an honorary doctorate degree, and that perhaps when somebody EXPLICITLY SPECIFIES the second type, they aren't talking about the first. That's not a syntax error, and it's plenty clear.
It's very unreasonable, and kind of rude to divert the discussion just to split hairs.
Not to mention that there wasn't even a syntactic or logical error in the original bloody statement. The full original quote plus parent comment was this:
>Supreme Court member Ruth Bader Ginsburg has an honorary degree from every single Ivy League School, with the exception of Cornell, which doesn’t give them out." ...except for her actual undergrad degree, which is from Cornell.
Clearly mentioning that her "undergrad degree" is an ACTUAL one, and not a "honorary".
Very clearly he adds to the information that "she has a honorary degree from every single Ivy League school except Conrell" that she also has "an actual udergrad degree, which is from Cornell".
It's CLEAR that his intention is to say that she has a degree, regardless of kind, from ALL Ivy League schools, and to also explain why she doesn't have one from Cornell (because Cornell doesn't need to give her a honorary one, they gave her their actual degree).
I agree that the parent comment is trying to say that RBG has a degree from Cornell already, but that's not really relevant to the article and it doesn't seem unreasonable to point out exactly why her degree from Cornell wasn't mentioned. It's not a categorical list of every degree she has, and doesn't pretend to be.
Nobody would object to the OP saying "funnily enough, she does have an earned degree from Cornell...", which is my point. Taking exception requires something to be factually incorrect.
There's a difference between "first" and "representative of how a thing caught-on and came to be established and practiced" -- the first uses might not be representative of neither the reason for widespread adoption nor current use.
There are countries whose universities need (and do) no marketing at all otherwise, because they are public and state sponsored, but still give honorary degrees to honour important contributors from outside the academic field.
This article should answer your question. It was recently posted (har har har) in HN:
http://priceonomics.com/why-do-colleges-give-out-honorary-de...
I happen to agree, but that's a different conversation.
But besides that, it's like giving a Th.D to St. Paul - GNU & free software in general is the reason a huge chunk of software and resulting work exists at all. An honorary degree doesn't really convey the scale of the accomplishment.
But it still really bugs me that he calls himself a PhD, and asks for the title "Dr." (And yes, I have a PhD, on which I worked for 11 years, at great cost to myself and my family. So feel free to take my comments with a grain of salt.)
A PhD doesn't mean that you're a very accomplished person. Or a smart person. Or an influential person. It demonstrates that you know how to create, execute, analyze, document, and defend a specific research project, using the tools and vocabulary of a discipline.
If a university wants to retroactively award Stallman a PhD for his research, then they should do so. I know that this has been done in the past, because a professor in my graduate program got his PhD in precisely this way -- he did amazing work, and someone said, "You know, this is worthy of a PhD." He wrote it up, and got it. It's quite possible that one or more universities would be willing to do this for Stallman.
But until they do, his honorary PhD is a way of indicating their gratitude and respect for his many contributions to the world of free software. Which is great, but it's not the same as a real PhD.
By the way, MIT (where I got my undergrad degree) doesn't give honorary degrees: http://news.mit.edu/2001/commdegrees I'm rather proud of this, as well as the fact that when you graduate, you don't do so "with honors" and such. Either you finished, or you didn't.
Also, even if you are Richard Stallman or Maya Angelou, demanding to be called "Dr" due to an honorary degree is just lame.
Besides, demanding any honourific is lame - proof of this is in the honorifics for politicians. :)
"To an unfamiliar Northerner one of very interesting and somewhat amusing phases of conditions down here is the panic fear displayed over the use of "Mr." or "Mrs." No Negro is ever called Mr. or Mrs. by a white man: that would indicate social equality. A Southern white man told me with humor of his difficulties:
"Now I admire Booker Washington. I regard him as a great man, and yet I couldn't call him Mr. Washington. We were all in a quandary until a doctor's degree was given him. That saved our lives! We all call him 'Dr.' Washington now."
Sure enough! I don't thing I have heard him called Mr. Washington since I came down here. It is always "Dr.' or just 'Booker.' They are ready to call a Negro 'Professor' or 'Bishop' or 'The Reverend' - but not 'Mr.'
https://books.google.com/books?id=QsLQAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA148&lpg=...
We don't normally call Ms Merkel "Frau Bundeskanzlerin" and we don't normally call MPs "Herr Bundestagsabgeordneter" or "Frau Bundestagsabgeordnete" (although you might address them this way in a formal letter, maybe).
Maybe this has something to do with abolishing royal/aristocratic titles in the aftermath of WW1 -- it certainly feels anachronistic and oldfashioned to me.
"Please, Reverend, call me 'Mr. President'. It's not that I need you to stroke my ego, it's that in this job I have to make some difficult choices that can be uncomfortable to me personally, and I would like you to emphasize the office rather than the person holding it"
As a Scandinavian, all honorifics, including "Mr." etc. sound weird, but that was a great explanation for why some people would like one.
http://www.collinsdictionary.com/spellcheck/english?q=honour...
Does that actually work? Will one get a better table?
Stallman's work hasn't entailed great effort, long years, and costs to himself and loved ones? As you say, a PhD is more about elbow-grease than intellect, but Stallman has that in spades - not only about the philosophy he espouses, but also that he personally created so much of the GNU environment that we take for granted these days. The work Stallman has done in his field exceeds that required of a PhD, and he has spent decades defending his thesis - and not just to experts in the field, but laypeople as well.
When push comes to shove, 'doctor' functionally means 'a master the field'. Stallman definitely is that. I think if you want to argue against honorary PhDs based on workload and execution, Stallman is not someone you would want to draw attention to. Otherwise you're basically arguing that the important part is the piece of paper and the process of red-tape, not the accomplishment of mastery.
He has decided not to do this. Thus, he shouldn't claim the title.
I think that Stallman could easily get a PhD in any of several disciplines, if he wanted to. One or more universities could (and should) have offered this option to him.
But he has decided not to finish, and no university has decided to give him a PhD. Rather, they gave him an honorary PhD. There is a difference, and he should have the decency to recognize it as such.
Life is about choices, including where you choose to put your time and money. Stallman has decided to put his time and money into free software. That's his choice, and it's a good one overall. But that doesn't automatically mean that he deserves to be praised as a PhD, or given the title "Doctor."
> Who holds ownership of the copyright to my thesis?
> In most cases the Institute will hold ownership of the copyright to a thesis. In general, students may retain ownership of thesis copyrights when the only form of support is from (1) teaching assistantships (the duties of which do not include research activities) and (2) NSF and NIH traineeships and fellowships (although the trainee or fellow may be required to grant certain publishing rights to NSF or NIH). See the current Specifications for Thesis Preparation for more details.
> Students may request a waiver of the Institute’s copyrights by written application to the Institute’s Technology Licensing Office (NE25-230).
Here's information about the copyright for a Harvard PhD, from https://www.physics.harvard.edu/uploads/files/grads/forms/um... :
> You may choose either open access or traditional publishing. If you choose Open Access Publishing, the published version of your dissertation or thesis will always be available for free download to anyone who has access to the Internet. The Traditional Publishing option works on a standard copy-sales and royalty-payments model. We sell copies of your work (in any format) and pay royalties as described in the Publishing Agreement. Either option gets your graduate research out where other scholars can find and use it through the ProQuest® Dissertations and Theses (PQDT) database, subscribed to by more than 3000 libraries worldwide.
Or to pick a non-Boston-area school, here are open access PhD these from Florida State - http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/etd/ .
Stallman has an honorary degree from the University of Glasgow. Pulling up the first PhD thesis from http://theses.gla.ac.uk/cgi/latest I see "Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author." The same is true from the couple of other theses I looked at.
He also has an honorary degree from Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology. I pulled up three PhD thesis from http://www.kth.se/en/ict/forskning/ickretsar/publikationer/r... . Two of them had a copyright statement by the PhD candidate, one had no explicit statement.
So it's not the case that thesis copyright transfer is a major issue preventing Stallman from getting a PhD.
I defended my dissertation, and then spent another six weeks editing and revising it in order to be accepted by my advisor and committee. If I hadn't spent those six weeks editing, and declared that their rules were unfair, and stopped right there, then it would be dishonest to say that I had finished my PhD. (And I should note that six weeks of editing is very little compared to what I've heard other people do.)
If you say that you have a PhD, you're saying that you followed the rules at an institution. Stallman is an impressive person by any measure, but he hasn't followed those rules, and is thus being disingenuous to use the title.
With regard to the use of this honorific, the policies of institutions of higher education generally ask that recipients "refrain from adopting the misleading title" and that a recipient of an honorary doctorate's use of the title "Dr" before their name should be restricted to engagement with the institution of higher education in question and not within the broader community.
Technically a lot of it is sebum.
(No disagreement, of course, that giving an honorary degree to influential people simply to make the university look better is a somewhat repulsive concept.)
The local Universities in my city award honorary degrees to College principles who sometimes don't have advanced degrees or indeed undergraduate degrees. Further Education colleges have a vocational focus here and people can come up via the vocational route, although that is rare now. The main reason for the award was so the Principal has a funny hat and cloak to wear at graduation time. No-one uses the actual title.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_brick_university
> Red brick university (or redbrick university) is a term originally used to refer to six civic universities founded in the major industrial cities of England. The term is now used more broadly to refer to British universities founded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in major cities. All of the six original redbrick institutions, or their predecessor institutes, gained university status before World War I and were initially established as civic science or engineering colleges.
i.e. "old" universities
For non-MDs, it feels like insisting on the title is petty.
The real question is why are medics without any form of doctoral degree calling themselves 'dr'?
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=doctor
It's a matter of custom. Customs can be changed. If I'm injured and cry out, "someone fetch a doctor!" I sincerely hope a "medic" answers the call.
I am very much looking forward to gaining a degree from some fringe yet accredited online university, and everybody who cares about that sort of thing will have to address me as 'Dr.' Precisely because caring too much about letters before and after one's name is asinine, vapid, and ultimately delusional.
Strive to be the best person you can be. And if you really want a better seat, why not embrace your inner arsehole fully, and get a disability badge?
My graduate school mentor told this story quite a bit, and it has always stuck with me:
I grew up poor, like dirt poor. Dirt floor, no shoes, backwoods poor. I did well in high school, I was well known around town, and people liked me. They knew I was a good kid with good intentions, who just happened to come from poor folks. I knew that graduating from high school would make me a big man. My parents had never finished high school. I knew people would look up to me.
Then I heard about university.
I knew that if I graduated with a bachelors that I would be it. People would respect me. People would look up to me. My parents didn't even know about the university system, let alone what getting a bachelors meant. So, I went to college, I did well. People knew me around campus, I was involved in clubs and sports and worked. People liked me. I knew I was going to be a big man.
Then I heard about graduate school. I had to get a masters. I knew for my career it would bring me respect. I knew personally it would bring me respect. People would know me.
Well, by that time, I knew about the PhD, so you can probably see where this is going.
I knew that when people had to call me Doctor, they would respect me. Doctor La___. It sounded good. People would know me, people would respect me. So I went to graduate school and I worked on my doc. I was well known in my classes. I worked on interesting and exciting research that led me to my current career. I am a leader in my field.
And I tell people not to call me Doctor. I want them to call me Jim.
It wasn't until my last semester of post-graduate work that I realized it.
People didn't respect me because of my degrees; they respected me because of who I was and what I did.
I had been treated the same since high school. People had always known my name, I had always received choice assignments at work, I was always greeted with friendly smiles and genuine enthusiasm when I traveled to see old acquaintances.
And none of it had to do with my degrees.
The moral of the story: If you rely on titles and public accolades to feel big, more than likely you spend too much time making yourself feel small.
(Ineffectual potentially but still political.)
I wanted to walk out when they got to his bit of the ceremony but general cowardliness took over - they might have revoked my degree if I had made a scene!
When he was presented for the applause I did my best to remain seated with my arms folded and a look of disapproval. I observed that over on the other side of the room where the parents were seated, he was getting a standing ovation, while my side of the room could be best described as "polite". No-one (as far I could see) was standing.
A masters is two years, so that's $35k per year. A PhD is 4-10 years, so that's 17.5k-7k per year.
It's starting to sound like a good investment!
I thought that was kinda the point of honorary degrees- a person accomplishes something in a particular field despite the lack of the formal education.
I went to Oxford, and the arts undergrads there can get an MA OXON 7 years after matriculation (arts courses are generally 3 years, and you don't do anything other than send in a form to get the Master's). I doubt anyone confuses it with the MEng that I got.
Using the title is a poncey thing. The last time I remember someone insisting on it was Helmut Kohl, when he got pissed off at some journalist.
Similar to Cambridge, for most or all subjects, Oxford will award a BA after three years, not just what we might think of now as 'arts'. Depending on the subject and institution, you might only get the BA if you stop after three years rather than carrying on for an undergraduate masters e.g. Study Engineering Science at Oxford for 4 years and you get an MEng (assuming you pass the required standards). You will not get a BA. Had you stopped after three years (or somewhere before the end of the 4th year) you'd have got a BA and could apply for the MA 21 terms after you matriculated.
- When you say "you don't do anything other than send in a form", I presume you mean the form applying to graduate 'in absentia'. That's a common, but optional, route. You can also choose to attend a real graduation ceremony.
- The basic university education at Oxford (and Cambridge and Dublin) always culminated with the award of a Master's degree. The age of entry and the number of years of study/residence changed.
The most coherent explanation I've seen for this is from Jonathan Jones: http://urchin.earth.li/oxnet/FAQs/ox.FAQ.html#33
- The Bachelor's/Master's (or baccalaureate/magister) distinction as it exists today is a relatively modern invention, according to Wikipedia[0].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Arts_(Oxbridge_and_D...
Journalism is dead. We're now just fodder for the "article hackers" whose job it is to get page views. There are different ways to do this for different audiences; this is the snobbish academic equivalent of a Buzzfeed article titled "15 Signs You Totally Have VD".
Our university boasts the like of Richard Stallman and supreme court justices!
On a personal note, the president of my alma mater happened to be leaving the year that I graduated. She gave herself an honorary doctorate!
Off the top of my head, I remember them being awarded to a few musicians (literature), a sportsman (Valentino Rossi, bike racer in "Communication Sciences"), tv personalities and only one that made some sense (Ronald Rivest, Computer Science).
(Interestingly enough, in Italy the "Dr." honorific is used for people with a master degree, not just a doctorate as it is elsewhere, so people receive just a master-level degree, not a Ph.D).
Seriously though, I'd like to offer a perspective that will hopefully demonstrate that OP's opinion is not devoid of merit.
I propose that in a perfect world, degrees would not be necessary. Also, grades would not be necessary for the same reason. Putting it in rather simplistic terms, both are something artificial that degrade the passion for knowledge by mixing it with the passion for prestige. They are a crude instrument serving as an external motivator that often comes at the expense of a natural and internal one which exists in everyone. An internal motivator is much better at rendering any difficulties along the path insignificant due to the joy of the pursuit.
Of course, I don't think that abolishing grades and degrees today would be wise. It would be a disaster, as irresponsible as taking taking away very good crutches from a handicapped person. I just hope that with time, the person can be taught to be more passionate about learning to walk than improving his crutches.
I assume this is not going to be a popular opinion because many people are too deeply invested in their academic achievements. Also, I might not be seeing the whole picture so I'm open to criticism.
"An academy is an institution of secondary education or higher learning, research, or honorary membership. The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, founded approximately 385 BC at Akademia (...) north of Athens, Greece".
This has been the early prototype for later roman, middle-ages, renaissance and finally modern colleges.
It wasn't the first teacher or even school were children were taught, but it was the first higher learning institution, with organized courses and mostly modern form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_higher-learning_instit...
Comparing it to the "guy who invented language"? As if it's something communally developed, whose origins are lost in prehistoric times? Really?
[these academies] are to be distinguished from the Western-style university which is an autonomous organization of scholars that originated in medieval Europe and was adopted in other world regions since the onset of modern times
Other than that, it's neither a well written article nor very accurate. In any case, the missing part before your quoted text is not "these academies". The article talks about several "ancient higher-learning institutions were developed in many cultures to provide institutional frameworks for scholarly activities". That part of the article is quite sloppy too (mentioning "museums", "scientific institutions" in a lemma referring to antiquity [1]).
Then it goes on to refer to the Academy too, later on, but even so, it undermines its own differentiation, as the Academy was both an "Autonomous organization"(check), and of "scholars" (check).
It didn't follow the full template of how a univerity today is (that starts around the 16th century), but it was most of the way there and is widely regarded as the precursor of the modern university (even the name "academic" is not a coincidence).
Now, my intention of reffering to the Academy was to give an example that the earliest college is something that we got in historical times and we know who created it (contrary to what the parents wrote).
If, as you suggest, we maintain that the first "actual" college was created even later, that serves me even better.
[1] There were museums in antiquity, but extremely few, and of them we know nothing much, and especially not that they operated any schools.
In an ideal world degrees would be about learning a subject to a greater depth, without the current mess of every job requiring a degree (any degree), so kids by default go to university and study something they have a vague interest in.
A degree is a fantastic thing for some people, it can reinforce a passion for their field, and in the best cases give them the tools to discover new things for humanity.
It's cargo cult thinking, really. It's not about the degree but what the individual degree represents. We like to assign unrelated meanings to it because we like easy answers.
> It's obviously degrees are bullshit, one day I hope
> people learn that