Sir John Daniel, President and Chief Executive Officer
Most US border officers are a surly lot but I had a friendly chat, as I passed through immigration recently, with one who had never heard of honorary degrees. Although all smiles, I'm not sure he was much wiser by the time I'd tried to explain them!
Receiving an honorary degree at SUNY's Empire State College (ESC) reminded me that they are a pleasant and harmless element of the academic tradition. The founder of ESC, Ernie Boyer, must have held the record for the number of honorary doctorates received (165), making my own collection look modest!
As a university president/vice-chancellor I discovered that students like having an honorary award at their own graduation ceremony. It adds lustre to the event and they seem not to resent the contrast between their own hard-earned degrees and this unearned title. With over 10,000 graduates a year the UK Open University held more than twenty degree ceremonies annually and had a systematic, bottom-up process for proposing and selecting honorary graduates for them. Meeting these people, who had distinguished themselves in a variety of fields, was an enriching experience.
I had the unusual experience of awarding two honorary doctorates to the late Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry and a lovely man: the first was as president of Laurentian University and the second as vice-chancellor of the UK Open University. A surprise was to find that actors like Judi Dench and Liam Neeson, who speak the words of others to millions in their professional capacities, are often very nervous about giving speeches of their own. I also realised that the Open University had made a wise decision not to make honorary awards to incumbent politicians, nor to engage in 'chequebook honours'. Rather than being an expression of hair-shirted self-denial, such rules prevent much nastiness in the approval process.
Receiving honorary degrees is fun too. Mine have always come as a surprise – none more so than my first, at Deakin University Australia in 1985. I was a youngster in the ODL field and it was a tremendous privilege to be honoured alongside two of the great ODL scholars of the 20th century, Borje Holmberg and Otto Peters. Holmberg was known for his work on correspondence education as 'guided didactic conversation', whereas Peters, by labelling ODL 'an industrial form of education', launched a controversy that lasted two decades and generated many – sometimes impenetrable – papers about Fordism. The work of both remains topical today.
The fact that my subsequent honorary degrees have come from 17 countries is as satisfying as their number. To single any of them out is invidious, but of many over-generous citations I particularly cherished the beautifully constructed text by Ronnie Carr at The Open University of Hong Kong. The two ceremonies in Africa, at the University of Education, Winneba and the University of South Africa (UNISA) were especially memorable, and I was delighted to be honoured by the University of Wales since my father, my uncle and my brother all graduated from it.
My main recollection of the ceremony at Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University in Thailand was the rector's anxiety about keeping to time, since the degrees were awarded by the very serious Crown Prince who is not a patient man. The Princess Royal, Princess Anne, who conferred my honorary doctorate from the Council for National Academic Awards, was much more relaxed. The largest ceremony I ever took part in was at the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), where 80,000 award recipients were linked to the main campus by satellite from sites all over India.
It is reassuring to be so honoured by universities where you have worked or studied, so I am proud of honorary fellowships from Oxford University and the UK Open University, as well as honorary degrees from the University of Paris VI, Athabasca and Laurentian. I could go on, because writing this brings back sweet memories, but let me note finally that as a Montréalais in spirit, I am proud to have received awards from all four of that city's universities: honorary doctorates from the Université de Montréal, McGill and the Télé-université, and an earned MA in Educational Technology from Concordia University that took me 25 years to complete. Honorary degrees take less time!