Doctorate No

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday October 13, 2001

The University of Sydney's admirable decision to tighten its honorary award system is a welcome reform. The status of honorary degrees has been devalued in recent years, with universities increasingly bestowing honours on people who have not put in years of academic work to produce original research. Universities have long recognised the contribution of non-academics. Prominent political figures and religious, industry and community leaders are regularly given honorary doctorates, usually toward the end of their careers. Such recipients are now being joined on honours lists by athletes, actors, authors and high-flying financiers.

Honorary degrees have been controversial for centuries, being seen either as an elite preserve or a form of flattery attracting wealthy benefactors. But in the era of the celebrity, universities have latched onto the briefly famous as an easy marketing strategy. Cuts in government funding for universities have been going on for years and since 1996 the number of honorary degrees offered has risen significantly. In the hope of attracting publicity and extra money, administrations have chased what are known in academia as ``trophy patrons". Last year, the 11 universities in NSW awarded 59 honorary doctorates.

While an honorary doctorate requires no academic work, it does entitle recipients to use the honorific term ``doctor", although in practice this is frowned upon. Another feature of honorary degrees is the pomp and pageantry involving ceremonial clothing and the reading of the citation. In contrast, students receive an earned degree in a relatively threadbare ceremony. Accordingly, honorary degrees carry great kudos in both the academic and wider community. Yet while Australian universities compete to secure celebrities, not all overseas universities choose to recognise outstanding achievement. Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University have policies that prohibit the granting of honorary degrees. Occasionally, as happened in 1972 at the University of California, Berkeley, student activism prompted authorities to scrap the system of honorary degrees. Nobody is suggesting Australian universities should go that far. But the University of Sydney's new guidelines for the granting of honorary doctorates should go some way to addressing concerns that the honour has been devalued by marketing priorities. The university will offer a revamped honorary fellow title to those unable to meet stringent academic criteria. It will also look for other ways of marking those who contribute to the university, such as naming rooms or buildings in their honour. The chairman of the university's honorary awards review committee, Mr John Hatzistergos, said it was important to preserve the integrity of the system. ``You can't buy a degree from this university," he said. Other Australian universities should adopt similar reforms.