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Comment by fiatmoney | Hacker News Reader

There should be a distinction between an "honorary" degree awarded because a "real" one would be superfluous (Richard Stallman, Increase Mather, etc) and those awarded because of donations or co-branding.

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Stallman is a hugely influential person. He has contributed a great deal to the world of free software. And giving him an honorary degree is a great thing, demonstrating his many accomplishments.

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.

Yeah, as a UVA grad I didn't realize they didn't give honorary degrees, but I think their approach of giving "medals" instead is the right one.

Also, even if you are Richard Stallman or Maya Angelou, demanding to be called "Dr" due to an honorary degree is just lame.

Demanding to be called Doctor is lame.

But when I, as someone without a PhD, says it they will say I just don't understand.

My favourite professor said that the only use for his 'Dr' was for getting a good seat table when making a reservation at a restaurant. It doesn't make your work or your opinions magically better, and there are plenty of clueless PhDs out there.

Besides, demanding any honourific is lame - proof of this is in the honorifics for politicians. :)

I found it was useful for addressing my postdoc instructors formally when they didn't seem comfortable on a first-name basis.

This discussion reminds me of an interesting story. In the South under Jim Crow, whites were very reluctant to call a black man "Mr.", which made things difficult when they had to discuss prominent people (like Booker T. Washington) who had to be addressed formally. The solution was to emphasize that person's title.

"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=...

I remember reading that this is why the late James Brown insisted on being called Mr Brown.

Thank you for sharing this. That "Following the Color Line" story was remarkable! I had to read it all. I really need to acquaint myself more with journalism/material like this from this era.

As a German I find the honorifics in politics just weird.

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.

A line from the show "The West Wing" went something like this:

"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.

Mad Magazine had a gag way back in the day saying that one of the benefits of being a senator is being called "The Honorable [name]", right up until they jail you for all the horrible things you did in office...

*honorific (even in Commonwealth spelling)

http://www.collinsdictionary.com/spellcheck/english?q=honour...

> the only use for his 'Dr' was for getting a good seat table when making a reservation at a restaurant

Does that actually work? Will one get a better table?

Samuel Johnson was commonly referred to as Dr. Johnson after he got his honorary degree from Oxford. I have no idea whether he demanded to be called "Doctor" or not; I suspect the latter.

> And yes, I have a PhD, on which I worked for 11 years, at great cost to myself and my family.

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.

Stallman deserves a real doctorate no doubt about that. He shouldn't be seen as the same as someone who happened to donate enough or be famous enough, he's done so much more. He shouldn't pretend he has an honour he hasn't earned either, that's just sad.

This gets back to the OP's original point, the need for a differentiation between PhDs between "My accomplishment is name recognition" and "I have done the work, I just didn't fill out out an application form first".

I'm guessing that if Stallman were to approach most universities, and say that he wants to turn his life's work into a PhD dissertation, they would welcome him with open arms. Within months, at most, he would have the PhD.

He has decided not to do this. Thus, he shouldn't claim the title.

A PhD doesn't mean that you worked hard. It means that you have worked on research in a certain field, judged by the standards of that field. Believe me, those "standards" can be arbitrary, and they often involve a lot of red tape, politics, and insanity. But they exist, whether we like it or not.

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."

I don't think Stallman would submit his work for a PhD, mainly because one's PhD work becomes the property of the university. It's against everything he stands for.

That's the default, but usually can be negotiated with the university.

For specific examples, here's MIT's policy, from http://libguides.mit.edu/c.php?g=176367&p=1159444#13351783 :

> 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.

So what you're saying is that Stallman doesn't like the way in which universities work -- so he gets to make his own rules, and claim that he's equivalent to someone who did play by the rules?

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.

The second paragraph of the Wikipeda[1] article on honorary degrees covers this:

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorary_degree

"more about elbow-grease than intellect, but Stallman has that in spades"

Technically a lot of it is sebum.

Even as a PhD, I do not want to be called doctor, nor do I call attention to it unless it is somehow relevant (which is almost never!). As you said, anyone can get a PhD if they just put in the blood and sweat, we should be judged by our accomplishments, not titles.

On the one hand it is true that a PhD has come to stand for "successfully completed an advanced research project according to the rules of the art," but surely there is something noble about judging people on their substantive contributions to the field regardless of the path that took them there.

(No disagreement, of course, that giving an honorary degree to influential people simply to make the university look better is a somewhat repulsive concept.)

In the UK at some universities ('redbrick' ones like Birmingham and Sheffield) it was possible to earn a Doctor of Science Degree by essentially listing research papers you had published in appropriate journals and writing a critical evaluation of your research field. It struck me that process might suit people like Stallman.

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.

For anyone else unfamiliar with the term "red brick":

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

In the UK and Ireland the really old universities are sometimes referred to as "ancient":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_university

I have a PhD (in mathematics) and am conflicted about the "Dr." title. I think it ought to be reserved for medical doctors, as there is a social good associated with knowing there is a medical doctor in the general vicinity.

For non-MDs, it feels like insisting on the title is petty.

I think medics should not be called doctors ("teachers") precisely because they don't have that degree.

At some point custom has to take over. Or shall we abolish the military rank of "lieutenant" because the officers of that rank are not ordinarily holding a place for someone?

Why should we accept medics stealing the meaning of a title that was created for academics?

The real question is why are medics without any form of doctoral degree calling themselves 'dr'?

Why should we accept that academics "stole" the meaning of a title that was created for theologians?

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.

Why do you think Stallman's honourary degree would be superfluous, because you like him?

Emacs or GCC alone are more impressive chunks of work than many Ph.D theses I've seen, if they were given a prettier write-up.

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.

So he wrote some software that more or less copied extant software, which was well used. That's undergraduate thesis level stuff. Has he done much on the theoretical (CS/Math) side to justify an advanced degree? I'd argue not

Isn't it fairly well accepted that 90% of PhD thesis will never be referenced or for the most part looked at again? Seems like an unworthy thing to get up on a high horse over.

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