What's Up, Doc
Epstein, Joseph
What’s Up, Doc The prestige of honorary degrees falls to record lows. BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN Northwestern, the university where I taught for 30 years, appears to have caught its nether parts in...
...Mr...
...Franklin” owing to honorary degrees given him by St...
...The iron law of diversity has contributed to this in a signifi cant way...
...Universities, those most cowardly of modern institutions, are never more beguiling than when caught out not having the courage of their lack of conviction...
...I’d like an honorary doctorate for my favorite Arab stallion, Fertile Crescent by name...
...The year President Clinton was the school’s commencement speaker, the faculty agreed to allow him to speak only if he were awarded no honorary degree...
...Controversy has surrounded the granting of honorary degrees from Oxford, Harvard, the Sorbonne in more recent years...
...A modest fee was mentioned, and then the president added, “Of course, we’ll toss in an honorary degree...
...Andrews and by Oxford for his scientifi c work with electricity...
...As soon as this harsh note of necessity enters the proceedings, distinction, and with it genuine prestige, departs...
...The trustees are, naturally enough, shocked by the request, but the president tells them not to worry, he’ll bring it off just fi ne...
...Commencement day in Langtry, seated on the stage behind the lectern are the recipients of the current year’s honorary degrees: Amiri Baraka, Brett Favre, Ra?l Castro, Germaine Greer, Yasser Arafat’s son-in-law, and the horse...
...The practice goes back to the 15th century...
...Cunningham,” the president says, “I’m sure that this can be arranged without any diffi culty at all...
...No contemporary university dare not include women, African Americans, and other minority members among the honorary degree recipients at its annual commencement lest it be attacked for offi cial bigotry...
...Linowitz combined modest fame for good works (he was ambassador to the Organization of American States) with heavy bread (he had been the chairman of the board at Xerox), which made him a near perfect candidate for an honorary degree: someone not disgraceful who just might donate a large sum to the school that had honored him...
...The fi rst step in this descent I noted was the awarding of such degrees to television journalists (Walter Cronkite, the man who has a face only a nation could love, must have a closet fi lled with the damn things...
...Thus I am withdrawing the offer of an honorary degree previously extended to you...
...The motive here, at least in part, is to get a commencement address on the cheap, and to give the graduating students the right to say that at their commencement someone wildly famous spoke...
...Perhaps it is a little late to report that I have an honorary doctorate, though just one, and, let it be emphasized, from a not very famous school...
...I was also once called by the president of a university in Illinois, an institution whose name I cannot now recall, who asked if I would fi ll in for the person, recently become ill, who was supposed to give the school’s commencement address...
...Bombeck gave a commencement talk full of laughs and that the talk was very well covered by the press...
...by honorary degrees awarded him by Trinity College, Dublin, and by Oxford...
...Perhaps the world’s most famous Dr., Samuel Johnson, was a Dr...
...When in 2001 Yale granted an honorary degree to George W. Bush, one of its alumni, students and some faculty members refused to attend commencement in protest...
...For many centuries thereafter honorary degrees tended to be awarded to scholars and scientists and occasionally to artists...
...Northwestern, I know, has given honorary doctorates to Robert Redford and Julia LouisDreyfus...
...Imagine now the meeting at Northwestern where it was decided to withdraw the offer of an honorary degree to Wright, with all turning to the doofus who suggested Jeremiah Wright’s name in the fi rst place...
...the fi rst honorary degree was awarded by Oxford to the Bishop of Salisbury...
...So low has the prestige of honorary degrees fallen by being given to thirdand fourth-class people that there are now even jokes about such degrees...
...And then, as the song has it, Reverend Wright went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid: not I love you but that the United States government invented AIDS to kill poor black people...
...no businessmen or politicians are given honorary degrees...
...His Fred Astaire will be published in September by the Yale University Press...
...Although it left Northwestern with the burden of fi nding another African American in time for commencement, the conclusion was inevitable: Sorry, Rev, no honorary doctorate for you...
...As a matter of fact there is,” the oil man replies...
...One of the best is about the fabulously rich oil man, T-bone Tex Cunningham, who one day calls the offi ce of the president of Southeast Texas A&M (at Langtry) to offer a donation of $100 million to the school...
...Sheer vulgar publicity is another...
...Not a few universities have been caught by the twists of history, awarding an honorary degree to someone who later turns out to be a dictator or other species of political monster: the University of Edinburgh and the University of Massachusetts (Boston) conferred honorary degrees on Robert Mugabe that one may be sure they wished they hadn’t...
...The degree itself has never meant much but in recent years even the honor has been greatly diminished...
...This remains the policy of the University of Chicago...
...Yale gave one some years back to Meryl Streep...
...Maya Angelou, who regularly refers to herself as “Dr...
...Getting a rich person to drop some of his or her swag on them is only one...
...The president steps up to the podium, and begins: Students, faculty, parents, and friends of Southeast Texas A&M university, I am proud presently to announce this year’s recipients of honorary degrees from our great institution...
...The larger problem, really, is the conferring of honorary degrees generally...
...I like to think that I have personally warded off any more offers of honorary degrees by asserting, in print, that I’d rather have a sandwich named after me than an honorary degree from Oxford or any other institution of higher-learning...
...Universities often award honorary degrees with such obvious motives in mind...
...Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Angelou,” has honorary doctorates only, and no undergraduate degree to go with them...
...All those powerful minds devising ways to cover the university’s fl eshy but soft fl anks...
...From there these degrees went to movie stars and television comedians...
...The president, in a mood of exultation at the size of the gift, asks T-bone if there is anything the school can do for him...
...As an African American and a woman, she may well have more honorary doctorates than anyone in the history of this strange ritual...
...A fi ne mess you’ve got us into this time, Stanley...
...BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN Northwestern, the university where I taught for 30 years, appears to have caught its nether parts in a wringer...
...When my wife wrote to the president of the school to suggest that doing so lowered the tone of the joint considerably, the president wrote back to say that Mrs...
...Benjamin Franklin became “Dr...
...It seems they approached the Reverend Jeremiah Wright about accepting an honorary degree, and, now that Wright has made clear the kind of clergyman he is, Northwestern has withdrawn its offer...
...At the next meeting of his board of trustees, the president of Southeast Texas A&M informs them of Cunningham’s enormous gift and the request that goes with it...
...Case closed...
...One can imagine the delight of the man or woman in Northwestern’s provost offi ce when he or she discovered Jeremiah Wright’s name and put him up for an honorary degree...
...But before I do, I want to point out that our school is today making history, and you all should be very proud that Southeast Texas A&M is fi rst in the nation to award an honorary doctorate to an entire horse...
...I hope that, in consolation, the morning of Northwestern University’s commencement, someone tells this joke to Reverend Jeremiah Wright...
...The president of the university, a man named Henry Bienen, in a letter to Reverend Wright, wrote that in light of the controversy surrounding statements made by you that have recently been publicized, the celebratory character of Northwestern’s commencement would be affected by our conferring of this honorary degree...
...Many years ago my wife’s school, DePauw University in Green castle, Indiana, gave an honorary degree to the newspaper columnist Erma Bombeck...
...I turned down the invitation but have never forgotten the phrase “toss in,” and even now regret I didn’t say to him that I’d much rather he toss in a rear-window defogger...
...Oxford went out of its way to refuse publicly to award such a one to Margaret Thatcher because she had severely cut university budgets in England...
...Yet one wonders if the graduates of Long Island’s Southampton College, allowed to reflect upon the matter in tranquility, were entirely pleased when their school gave an honorary degree to Kermit the Frog...
...My late friend Sol Linowitz once told me that he had 64 such degrees...
...A cultural historian may one day be able to measure the fall from seriousness of American universities by tracking the people to whom they chose to award honorary degrees...
...For it wouldn’t do, when passing out honorary degrees each spring, not to have one go to an African American, and by now surely Northwestern must have awarded honorary degrees to all the usual suspects: Toni Morrison, Bill Cosby, Maya Angelou, John Hope Franklin, et alia...
Vol. 13 • May 2008 • No. 35
