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Each Spring, thousands of American graduate students don fancy robes and walk across stages to accept their doctorate degrees. For most, the ceremony is the culmination of years of dedicated scholarship, hard work, emotional breakdowns, and tuition dues.<\/p>\n
But for others present on commencement day, the struggle is not so real. Joining the students on stage, celebrities and business moguls \u2014 Mike Tyson, Kylie Minogue, Oprah, Ben Affleck, and Bill Gates among them \u2014 flock to college campuses to receive \u201chonorary\u201d doctorate degrees. Unlike the students, these luminaries are given a free pass: universities allow them to bypass all of the usual requirements.<\/p>\n
Though these degrees are more ornamental than functional, the practice of handing them out stems from a somewhat ignoble past.<\/p>\n
For more than 500 years, the honorary degree has provided an opportunity for colleges to build relationships with the rich, famous, and well-connected, in hopes of securing financial donations and cheap publicity.<\/p>\n
A Brief History of the Honorary Degree<\/strong><\/p>\n In 1478, representatives from England\u2019s Oxford University approached a young bishop named Lionel Woodville. At the time, Woodville was a man of great honor: he was not only the head of the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter, but enjoyed the distinction of being King Edward IV\u2019s brother-in-law. Well-connected, wealthy, and of noble standing, he was just the kind of man that Oxford wanted to curry favor with.<\/p>\n At the behest of the university, a finely-dressed courrier was sent to deliver Woodville a doctorate degree. For the nobleman, all of Oxford’s strict academic requirements were excused; with the presentation of a piece of paper, he was swiftly and automatically declared the modern-day equivalent of a Ph.D.<\/p>\n This marked the first \u201chonorary” degree in history.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was clearly an attempt to honor and obtain the favor of a man with great influence,\u201d writes one historian — and for Oxford, the move paid off. Shortly after awarding him the degree, Woodville was offered (and accepted) a post as the Chancellor of the University. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, prestigious institutions like Oxford would don hundreds of other men, all of whom were members of the noble elite, similar degrees. In 1642 alone, some 350 doctorates were doled out by Charles I \u2014 many of which went directly to members of his court.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, in North America, Harvard University was in the midst of promoting Increase Mather, an influential Puritan minister, to President of the University. In 1692, just days before his appointment, Harvard instantaneously bestowed Mather with a \u2018Doctor of Sacred Theology\u2019 \u2014 a degree for which other candidates had to study a minimum of 5 years to obtain. This was the beginning of a long, steady procession of honorary doctorates at America\u2019s most prestigious institutions.<\/p>\n Between 1700 and 1900, more than 200 different types of degrees were awarded, ranging from B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. titles (which came with all the benefits of earned degrees), to the LL.D., which was strictly ornamental and was not meant to insinuate academic prowess.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, recipients of the latter often still considered themselves deserving of the title: Benjamin Franklin, who received honorary LL.D. degrees from 7 universities (including Harvard and Yale), was known to strut around town pronouncing himself \u201cDoctor Franklin,\u201d and often requested others refer to him in a similar manner.<\/p>\n Why do Modern universities give out Honorary Degrees anyway?<\/strong><\/p>\n A little over a decade ago, Arthur E. Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University admitted that honorary degrees are about two things: money and publicity.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes they are used to reward donors who have given money; sometimes they are used to draw celebrities to make the graduation special,” he told The New York Times. “I’ve always viewed it as the last lesson a college can teach, by showing examples of people who most represent the values the institution stands for.\u201d<\/p>\n Last year, Burlington Free Press writer Tim Johnson compiled a list of every University of Vermont honorary degree recipient from 2002 to 2012, then dug into financial statements to see how much each of those individuals had contributed to the university in the decade preceding their \u201chonor.\u201d Here\u2019s what he found:<\/p>\n \u201cOf the 60 recipients, 35 were on the record as having made donations to the university, for a total of $13.6 million (an average of $228,248)…even excluding one degree recipient with an outsized $9 million contribution, the average was $68,854.\u201d<\/p>\n His takeaway \u2014 that the university simply gave a degree to those who\u2019d donated large sums of money \u2014 is no mystery. In another instance, after businessman J. Mack Robinson donated $10 million to Georgia State University\u2019s School of Business, the school almost immediately rewarded him with a doctorate degree for his \u201coutstanding contributions to the field of business.\u201d<\/p>\n Aside from stroking the intellectual egos of wealthy donors, many universities see the honorary degree process as an opportunity to score some free publicity.<\/p>\n There is perhaps no greater example of this than when New York\u2019s Southhampton College awarded an honorary doctorate in \u201camphibious letters\u201d to Kermit the Frog in 1996. In the aftermath, 31 newspapers picked up the story, resulting in a \u201cfree marketing bonanza that raised the college\u2019s profile and drew hundreds of new admissions.\u201d<\/p>\n Amidst this controversy, some universities \u2014 notably Cornell, Stanford, and UCLA \u2014 choose not to participate. William Barton Rogers, the founder of MIT, regarded the practice of giving honorary degrees as “literary almsgiving…of spurious merit and noisy popularity.” To this day, the school does not award them.<\/p>\n Likewise, when Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, he explicitly banned honorary degrees, fearing that they would be awarded based on \u201cpolitical or religious enthusiasms rather than on scholarly considerations.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, instead of awarding honorary degrees, the University of Virginia presents the \u201cThomas Jefferson Foundation Medal,\u201d an honor that is entirely separated from any associations with a doctorate degree.<\/p>\n Still, these institutions are a minority in the vast sea of colleges that continue the practice of doling out honorary degrees. And today, Jefferson\u2019s fears seem to be as valid as they were 200 years ago.<\/p>\n