My most cancellable academic take

My most cancellable academic take is that honorary degrees are bad. I have three reasons.

First, handing out honorary degrees creates an unforced reputational attachment to figures who may later become embarassing. Any award can age badly, but an honorary degree trades on the university’s authority to certify education. For example, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago had to revoke Kanye West’s honorary degree when he started throwing up metaphorical Hitler salutes (later literal ones). Universities could avoid this humiliation ritual if they stopped bribing celebrity speakers with fake credentials.

Second, an honorary doctorate cheapens the value of an actual doctorate. A doctorate is mainly a certificate of endurance. As the old joke goes, “All dissertations are bad but some are finished.” An honorary doctorate is just an honour—it goes under the awards section of LinkedIn, not education.

Finally, honorary doctorates create the rare but entirely avoidable temptation for already successful people to call themselves “Doctor”. At least in the US and Canada, it is already a borderline faux pas for legitimate PhD holders to use the title outside of rarefied academic settings. For honorary degree holders, it is just embarrassing.