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Archive 1

How about Germany?

I know that in Germany honorary degrees are taken one whole hell of a lot more seriously than in the US, and I think even than in the UK -- it seems to me they are not handed out as freely to TV personalities and film stars simply for being famous, or to rich donors, but really are awarded to great scholars as a way to honor the scholar and to honor the university confgerring the degree by association. Honorary degrees are also customarily used much more often in names (that is, an American professor with four honoraries will only list them toward the bottom of his curriculum vitae, whereas a German will list his name as "Dr. Dr.(hc) Dr.(hc) Dr.(hc) Dr.(hc) Johann Schmidt" on his business card).

Perhaps some expert in German etiquette and academics could add a section to his article on German, Austrian, and Swiss practice, and for any other continental universities.Amherst5282 04:05, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Nelson Mandela

I've removed "Nelson Mandela has been awarded more than 120 honorary degrees." from the lead section, because it doesn't belong there. Feel free to re-integrate into the article (and please cite a source when doing so). -- Lea (talk) 07:38, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Medical Doctorate

There needs to be information added about MDs (Medical Doctorate) to the last paragraph in the Practical Use section. MDs are an earned degree in the USA also. Elexsor (talk) 17:30, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Phyllis Schafly

Wasn't there controversy recently in 2008 in people not wanting Phyllis Schafly not get an honorary degree? -- Guroadrunner (talk) 22:50, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, there was controversy between the conference of a Doctor of Humane Letters degree. It is currently under the "Life" section on her wiki article.Darthjarek (talk) 23:50, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Award of honorary doctoral degrees by Associate Degree College?

I was concerned when attending an Associate Degree College Graduation when 3 honorary Doctorates were awarded by someone who didn't have one. I thought only Universities with Doctoral Programs could offer Doctoral Degrees. Am I confused? 24.177.249.157 04:23, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Where was this? In some jurisdictions there are legal restrictions on who can award degrees, in others anyone can churn them out and it takes reputation and accreditation to give them standing. Timrollpickering (talk) 11:17, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Use of title 'Doctor' by clergy

The article claims that clergy customarily use the title 'Dr' with an hononary degree. Although there are examples given, there are many more counter-examples, as many bishops are awarded hononary degrees by universities within their diocese.

To give a specific example, when Archbishop Hollingworth was to be appointed Governor-General of Australia in 2001, he was specifically awarded a Lambeth Degree in Theology, despite already holding four hononary degrees - the Australian Government stated that the Lambeth Degree, as a substantive degree, would confer the title 'Doctor' whereas the honorary degrees did not (the style 'Dr' was desired for Hollingworth, because as a bishop he could not be correctly titled 'Mr' and the government did not wish to use the style 'Rt. Rev.' for the Governor General - Dr is a valid alternative if held). See Australian Federal Hansard of Tuesday 14 May 2002.

The Lambeth Degrees are really in a class of their own, and are nearly always awarded on the basis of proven learning, either through study run by Lambeth or assessing existing contributions (similar to higher doctorates which are most definitely not honorary degrees). So I don't think they're the best examples defining this.
In terms of other use by clergy this is very mixed and varies heavily by denomination. It may also depend upon which honorary degree they hold - "Dr" based on an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree may be more likely to be used (because it is a specific religious degree) than an honorary Doctor of Civil Law/Laws/Letters, regardless of what the university has available to give out (not all have Doctor of Divinity degrees). There's also the question of the standing of university itself, particularly if it's overseas, unaccredited and/or a diploma mill - for example Ian Paisley uses "Dr Ian Paisley" based first on a 1954 qualification from the now-outlawed American Pioneer Theological Seminary (a diploma mill) and also holds a 1971 honorary degree from Bob Jones University (unaccredited). His critics have sometimes queried his use of the title precisely because of the degree origins but he's far from the only non-conformist minister to use a title based on either such doctorates. Timrollpickering (talk) 12:14, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Honorary as an Academic Degree?

I think you have to specify the type of academic degree (describe it further in detail- probably you have to put academic honorary degree not just academic degree)an honorary degree is because the way people look at this - this is an award- bestowed by a university not an "academic degree" brought about by the rigorous work of a graduate student enrolled in a university. In writing biographies, the academic degrees (product of actual university work + enrollment) are placed under one group and the honorary doctorates are usually placed under awards. In case , one ask what is your highest academic attainment, you don't have to say your doctoris but you have to say that you have a master's or bachelors earned from actual university work but you have a doctoris causa. So they can legally address you as a doctor... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.95.59.40 (talk) 15:42, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Use of the title "Doctor" by non-medical individuals

It says that it is not usual for an individual with a doctorate to use the title "Doctor" at least in the US. I've been witness to just the opposite in that almost anyone I know with a doctorate uses the title. So I am just wondering if that's an error. Also, I was once reading a secretary's guide that talked about proper etiquette in letter writing and social situations. It said that no one except for medical doctors should use the title "doctor" when addressing them and that the only distinction that can be made is to add the person's degree as a suffix, i.e. John Smith, Ph.D. I've also seen this in other references. I don't see this anywhere in the article, so should this be included somewhere and does someone know of such a reference that states this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Darthjarek (talk • contribs) 00:24, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I agree, the only people in the US who object to PhDs being called "doctor" are pompous MDs. I know plenty of people with PhDs, EdDs, etc who are regularly called "Doctor Jones" etc. both professionally and socially. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.15.156.226 (talk) 14:25, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


As someone who holds a substantive U.S. PhD, from an Ivy League university, I have to say that it is not the custom for PhD's in the Arts and Sciences to use the title in the United States. One reason is that most of these people are academics, and it generally assumed that university professors hold PhD's. The other is that, for historical reasons, the title "Dr." has come to be reserved for physicians and dentists in the U.S. I have no problem with that usage, nor do I have any problem with the fact that, in Europe, I am routinely addressed as "Doctor." In my view, local usage obtains. My fellow academics and I generally regard use of the title as pretentious. A friend who earned his PhD at Harvard tells me that, there, calling yourself "Doctor" is considered infra dig. I certainly get the point.Lolliapaulina51 (talk) 23:00, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

In the UK, in the field of computer science, academically the use of the term doctor is widespread. E.g. Lecture at 10 with Dr. Hughes.94.168.168.153 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 17:52, 30 January 2011 (UTC).

I would agree that the use of the pronominal title of Dr. is widespread, if not ubiquitous, in both the UK and Australia (I only have experience of these two countries). I wonder whether the custom (if I'm not mistaken) in the US of referring to all lecturers as "professors" may be a reason why the title 'Dr.' can be omitted, as I'm not sure how I would have addressed my lecturers if not as "Dr. So-and-so". Some lecturers are happy to be addressed informally by first name, but this is by no means the norm. (NB. The term "Professor" in the UK and Australia, and probably elsewhere, is reserved for those with a senior faculty position.) Melissza (talk) 13:27, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Removed Sixto Rodriguez from list

I removed Sixto Rodriguez from the list of people using the honorary degree: there's no evidence that he actually refers to himself as "Dr. Rodriguez". --Slashme (talk) 10:35, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Charles Malik

In a the "Practical use" section, Charles Malik is listed under "Notable people using the honorary prefix". However, the text also says "His original title was 'doctor', as he had earned a PhD from Harvard." Surely, then, he was not using the honorary prefix, but simply the prefix appropriate to his degree.ChasFink (talk) 16:54, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

That entire section needs a serious overhaul. It's too long, contains numerous unsourced statements, and is turning into a sort of general-purpose list of people with honorary doctorates. There's certainly something to be said for keeping a short list of historical and contemporary examples of use of honorary doctoral titles, but I think we can probably afford to lose at least half of that list. The Malik entry, for example, is unsourced so I'd consider it a prime candidate for deletion. -- Nicholas Jackson (talk) 06:13, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

Deletion of recipients of honorary degrees category

There does not appear to be a consensus for reviving these categories. Number 57 19:05, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

This category was deleted - see Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2013_December_12#Category:Recipients_of_honorary_degrees. The category was deleted as not important and cluttered, with only four participants. I think we should have a wider discussion about that. The category is used on many other Wikipedias (consider https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6326860 ; on pl wiki there are dozens if not hundreds of subcategories of the "Foo-ian university honorary degrees". Having a honorary degree is one of the criterias of notability (see Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(academics)#Is_having_a_honorary_degrees_enough_for_WP:N.3F). I find it puzzling that we can say something makes a person notable, but is not important to warrant a category. Receiving a honorary degree from certain institutions is a big deal; nearly every day world news media has a story that someone notable received that type of an award. Current Google News search gives me for example a headline "Aretha Franklin Receives Harvard Honorary Degree" (http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/aretha-franklin-receives-harvard-honorary-degree-20140530]). Are we seriously saying that it's ok to have Category:Awards by Harvard University, but one of the most prestigious award Harvard can bestow, it's honorary degree, does not deserve a category? Such a category exists on German, Polish, Russian and Swedish wikis ([1]) - is it just me who thinks it's ridicolous that this type of award categorization is deemed ok on four major wikis,but not here? Sure, Harvard is a big deal, but awards from smaller universities matter too: "Jim Carrey Delivers Emotional Commencement Speech, Receives Honorary Doctorate Degree" from Maharishi University of Management ([2]). For a last example, I just copyedited a bio that on a pl wiki has a Category:Receipient of honorary doctorate degree from the Warsaw University of Technology, well populated and also deemed important enough to create on de wiki ([3]). Finally, it's a category that fits perfectly within Category:Award winners by subject (or perhaps Category:Science award winners). It is my my opinion that honorary degrees are a major type of a science award, and deserve a category. I am planning on asking for this category to be restored, but before that, I'd like to ask for comments from the community. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 10:41, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

  • The vast majority of award winner categories should be deleted. The fact is that most people who have won awards have won a lot of awards, and they are not notable because of their award winning, much less defined by their awards. The awards are useful, and it might be of interest to have various lists: Computer scientists with honorary degrees; Honorary degrees from the University of Blahdy Blah; etc. But lumping together all the disparate people who receive honorary degrees for all kinds of reasons doesn't really help navigation. In fact, it will over time hurt navigation, because it's impossible to police categories, and make sure that people aren't added or removed erroneously. Better by far to use categories only when necessary to fit them into an essential category tree; and use other navigation methods (lists, nav boxes) for things like this. --Lquilter (talk) 18:39, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
  • I would oppose restoring that category. We have categories for alumni but not for degree holders. I posit that honorary degrees 99 times out of 100 are not awards for merit, but political gifts for the self-important. Chris Troutman (talk) 03:38, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Not sure. I may be prejudiced by my personal distaste for honorary degrees. I note in passing that Richard Feynman shared my distaste; he refused ALL offers of honorary degrees. OTOH, some honorary degrees definitely are in good faith and more than earned. But I have not read the article. I don't intend to. It seems to me that Lquilter has the right attitude. If we cannot say that a given category is unconditionally diagnostic of notability, then we should beware of categorising too freely, either positively or negatively. JonRichfield (talk) 19:02, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Feynman was at a level where he could indulge his idiosyncrasies, and he did exactly that. Since receiving such a degree counts in many fields for notability, and is sometimes even considered definitive proof, I think we probably should include it. It would be a useful exercise to examine the lists available from major universities and use them as a checklist to add missing articles. DGG ( talk ) 03:50, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
  • I'm inclined to agree that the category is not terribly useful for (and even potentially problematic with regard to) navigation if incorporated as one broad, unrefined category. However, categories for those with honorary degrees in specific fields could possibly find some usefulness with regard to articles which are concerned with said field. Snow talk 23:36, 10 June 2014 (UTC)
  • I don't see the harm of having this exist as a viable category. It is certainly possible that a researcher may wish to use Wikipedia to compile a list of all (or some subset of) notable persons who have received an honorary degree. SueDonem (talk) 17:55, 12 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Remove. Let's be clear, it is harmless as hundreds of thousands of other harmless, but also useless, articles. But being harmless is not a passport for notability. Silvio1973 (talk) 09:50, 24 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Oppose use of this category. There are a great many universities, most of whose honorary degrees have no practical significance. Whilst an honorary degree from Oxford or Cambridge (or Yale or Harvard for those of you on the other side of the pond) is a genuine recognition by respected academics and educators, and its award or retention may even have a wider social significance (e.g. the case of Margaret Thatcher), only the very dull and the very naïve would pay attention to honorary degrees from the lower tiers of universities. One suspects that in such cases the award of an honorary degree is the price the university pays for an interesting speaker at its graduation ceremony, or an attempt to burnish the university's own lustre by association. I'm carefully not naming names here, but it was the work of a moment for me to google the term "honorary degree" with an assortment of B- and C-list celebrities. I didn't even bother to count, there were so many: without any effort I found soap stars and pop stars, both major and minor, boxers, cricketers, crass comedians and unfunny comediennes, and more television personalities than you could shake a stick at. These awards are not to people who have made a notable contribution to the sciences or the arts: they're just payment for an entertaining speech (and cheaper than the speaker's £5,000 appearance fee). If we could restrict this category to major universities it might be useful, but any debate on what counts as a "major" university would be invidious, and I can't imagine we'd ever get agreement on it. So better not to have this category. RomanSpa (talk) 09:28, 25 June 2014 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Practical use

I think the "Practical use" section has got a bit out of control, and suggest the deletion or pruning of the following entries:

  • Charles Malik: delete (unsourced).
  • Peter Hollingworth: keep, but entry is unnecessarily long.
  • Billy Graham: delete second sentence unless a source can be found.
  • Ian Paisley: keep, but until his ennoblement as Lord Bannside, was regularly referred to by the UK media as "Revd Dr Ian Paisley". (Needs source, though.)
  • Maya Angelou: keep.
  • Booker T Washington: delete (unsourced).
  • University of Exeter: delete (unsourced, plus Exeter certainly isn't the only university to do this).
  • Terry Wogan: delete (unsourced, questionable relevance)
  • Judy MacArthur Clark: delete (no wiki article).
  • Ralph Stanley: delete (unsourced).
  • Paco de Lucia: delete (unsourced, not stated whether he uses the title).
  • Stephen Colbert: delete (unsourced, questionable relevance).
  • Mirza Ahmed: delete (unsourced, insufficiently notable for these purposes).
  • Jakaya Kikwete: keep.
  • Richard Stallman: keep.
  • Samuel Johnson: keep, but entry is a bit long.

This should leave us with a shorter list of historical and contemporary examples of the practical use of honorary doctoral titles. -- Nicholas Jackson (talk) 06:33, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

It's weird to have Hunter S. Thompson in this list of Notable people as well. His doctorate wasn't so much honorary as something acquired from Universal Life Church -- a fake doctorate. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.199.76.177 (talk) 21:18, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

In-Page Link

So I tried to fix this line: 

See [[Customary degrees (''Ad eundem'' degrees)|below]].

So that the link actually went to the subsection on the same page by adding the "#", but it didn't actually work. Does anybody around here know how to fix it? rellmerr (talk page • contribs) 14:44, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

 Done I figured it out. rellmerr (talk page • contribs) 21:44, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

Sukarno

I removed the sentence that said, "Sukarno is the president with the highest number of honorary doctorates in the world", which was cited to [4]. Not only is that link broken, but the article claims that Sukarno received 26 honorary doctorates. However, List of awards and honours bestowed upon Nelson Mandela lists over 50 honorary doctorates received by Mandela, the former president of South Africa. In fact, it's probably well over that because I wasn't even counting the degrees listed as "honorary degree" with no indication of rank. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 04:07, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

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"Usage of degree" is discussed in many sections

In almost every section of the article you find a repetition of the same info regarding how the hon. degree is used and how it is called. 74.50.214.161 (talk) 03:17, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

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