When President Obama gave his commencement address at the University of Notre Dame last month, he lightened the mood with a joke about honorary degrees. “So far I’m only one for two as president,” Mr. Obama said. “Father Hesburgh is 150 for 150.”
He was referring to the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, former Notre Dame president, who just turned 92. And that number, 150, is correct. No one has racked up more honorary degrees than Father Hesburgh.
So how did he do it?
Well, he’s accomplished a lot in his life. He was president of Notre Dame for 35 years, longer than anyone else. He has held 16 presidential appointments, marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and helped save starving Cambodians. His autobiography is titled God, Country, Notre Dame —an indication of his priorities. If prompted, he will tell you a story about meeting John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office that is fascinating but much too long to recount here.
He also gives a pretty good speech. In 1958, he delivered the commencement address at Dartmouth College, which also gave him an honorary degree (four years earlier Le Moyne College, in Syracuse, N.Y., became the first of many to so honor Father Hesburgh). “Why are you alive, where are you going, and why?” he asked graduates. The speech was so popular that the class of 1958 asked him to update it 25 years later and then again at their 50th reunion.
Father Hesburgh can’t remember all the institutions where he’s received honorary degrees, and he certainly can’t remember all the commencement addresses he’s given. But he does always strive to keep his remarks simple. “I try not to talk too long, and I try to say something pointed that they’ll remember,” he says.
His closest competitor for the title of King of Honorary Doctorates is an actual king: Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand. In 1997, the king claimed to have 136 honorary degrees, surpassing Father Hesburgh’s total at the time. The Guinness World Records people still list the king’s 136 as the record, even though Father Hesburgh has clearly outpaced him.
For his part, Father Hesburgh isn’t particularly impressed with the king. “His degrees are from high schools and dinky little places in Thailand,” says the Roman Catholic priest. He adds, “Thailand is a land of fantasy.”
Dinky or no, the little places in Thailand may feel especially motivated to honor the king, who has the power to imprison those who insult him and has exercised that right on occasion.
The king could not be reached for comment. When asked whether he ever granted interviews, a representative at the Thai Embassy laughed before responding: “No.” Written questions, the representative explained, could be sent to the king, but an answer would probably take months and the request would have to be accompanied by a promise that the article would portray the king in a favorable light.
The Chronicle was unwilling to make such a promise.
The king of Thailand is, in his own way, a man of genuine accomplishment. He is, after all, the world’s longest-reigning monarch. But sometimes honorary degrees are bestowed upon people whose accomplishments are slightly less stellar. Mike Tyson, Kermit the Frog, and Bruce Willis have all been given honorary degrees. Mike Tyson was a great boxer, Kermit is a hero to millions of kids, and Bruce Willis has been in some action movies —but they’re not exactly Father Hesburgh.
That’s part of the problem with honorary doctorates, says John Bear, who has written at length about them in his well-known distance-education guides. He first became annoyed with honorary degrees when, soon after earning his own, real Ph.D. from Michigan State University, he learned that Southern Methodist University had given one to Bob Hope. While Mr. Bear had spent years studying, Bob Hope had written a check for a new campus theater. Those two things did not seem equivalent. “The real problem is the use of the word ‘doctorate,’” says Mr. Bear. “We give people awards all the time, but to use an existing title is very strange.”
(An article from the Dallas Morning News, published at the time, said the degree was bestowed on Hope for his contributions to SMU and for relieving “the frustration and loneliness of men at war.”)
Strange or not, there’s a long history in the United States of doling out honorary degrees.
The definitive book on the practice was written by Stephen Edward Epler. Mr. Epler, who died in 1997, was the founder of Portland State University and is credited with inventing six-man football. He is also the author of Honorary Degrees: A Survey of Their Use and Abuse, a 200-plus page examination of the subject’s history, published in 1943.
In the book, Mr. Epler notes that Benjamin Franklin received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary. He quotes Franklin, speaking here for all honorary-degree recipients: “Thus, without studying in any college, I came to partake of their honors.”
Mr. Epler takes a dim view of honorary degrees, concluding that colleges should abandon them: “The wisest and most practical solution of the honorary degree problem,” he writes, “is to give no honorary degrees and, if necessary, to develop new honorifics.”
A few institutions already abide by that advice, including Cornell University. Last year faculty members considered a proposal to change the university’s longstanding tradition of not giving out honorary degrees. The proposal was “dead on arrival,” as one administrator put it. The only way to get a degree from Cornell is to earn one.
The University of Virginia doesn’t hand them out either, supposedly because Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder, thought they were a bad idea. That has served the institution well, according to Alexander Gilliam, the university’s history officer.
While Notre Dame took flak for giving President Obama an honorary degree and Arizona State University took flak for denying him one, Virginia doesn’t have to deal with such controversies. Says Mr. Gilliam: “It keeps us out of an awful lot of trouble.”
