Now that just sounds fake.
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The process of decisiding when to award an honorary degree varies from institution to institution, and even from year to year for a given institution. URI has an honorary awards committee including faculty and students (but also administrators and outsiders), they are advisory to the President and thence to the URI Board of Trustees, which has the ultimate authority. In RI this board is appointed by the governor. In this case the decision to revoke is said to have originated from the Faculty Senate, who sent this request to the awards committee, and it went up the line.
The more interesting question is why the honorary degrees were given in the first place; if that process has academic integrity (which it doesn’t at most places I know of) then degrees shouldn’t be withdrawn lightly. In this case I suspect that the original decision to award these two degrees did not originate with the awards committee, but was imposed from above, and the committee members who were not students or faculty rubber stamped it. (I can’t find URI Board of Trustees minutes from 2014, so can’t confirm this.)
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(I think? this was in tribute to Herbie Hancock receiving one)
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Yeah, I had to pay for my Honorary Degree.
Hey, if a Doctor of Divinity is good enough for Hunter S. Thompson, it’s good enough for me!
ETA: well, the Degree itself was actually free, but the spiffy frameable certificate was about ten bucks…
ETA More: The thought of an atheist with a Doctor of Divinity degree is something I find amusing. YMMV.
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Is that not what MBA actually stands for, in practice?
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Interestingly, it’s a boarding school, which makes giving an honorary degree to Malcolm Forbes even stranger. I think he was given that one in 1986, when he was 66. And the school was founded in 1982.
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Could be worse.
although, iin the beginning, the managerial class had law degrees.
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Not sure how, really
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I mean, I’m not saying it would be easy to be worse.
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He was a shitty mayor at a shitty moment in history but the shittiness didn’t seem to be his fault that day so he got a great big participation trophy from the media right before they started cheering for the Global War On Whatever
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Politicians have been known to fake higher degrees.
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I got mine from the University of Bums on Seats
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Finally- truth in advertising!
“ We look forward to receiving your tuition fees.
”
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Eh, it really depends. Their original purpose was, after all, to recognise those that had done a lot for a field that they had never received a degree in.
For example, I fully support Phil Harding’s honorary doctorate in archaeology, because he has done much, much more for both the research and the popularisation of the field in the UK than almost any degree holder.
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