Commencements and honorary degrees

When Academics Receive Honorary Degrees

Edward Tufte

Minor celebrities, as they grow older, gratefully accumulate honorary degrees, medals, and trophies. Awards made from stone, plastic, and metal tend toward the tacky, in the style of Bowling League Winner or Tortured Metal Art. I prefer the paper of honorary degrees.

The graduation festivities accompanying honorary degrees are notable and even moving. Everyone is robed up, the faculty outfitted in a quirky diversity of academic gowns; best are the gowns and especially the little hats from British and European universities. And the ritual itself is suitably majestic.

In exchange for continual intense flattery, honorary degree recipients usually must give a speech. The commencement speaker’s tasks are (1) to remember that this is an academic occasion honoring the graduating students and their teachers, (2) to provide an exemplar of accomplishment, (3) to say something that has some power and a gently provocative quality, and (4) to be brief, very brief. I usually talk about forever knowledge, because that is what colleges should provide and that is what will last for the students. I also try to advance my field of analytical design.

Commencement speakers, to remind themselves of the oratorical importance of false modesty, should remember that they were probably not the college’s first choice. Perhaps I’m receiving an honorary degree because Maya Lin and G. B. Trudeau were already booked up. If all three of us turn the college down, then it’s a rich donor or a bubbly television news reader.

Occasionally the degree is accompanied by a modest honorarium, thereby providing a precise measure of the modesty of one’s minor celebrity. My policy is to donate the money back to the college and to walk off with the colorful hood that comes with the degree. A real celebrity might get $75,000 for a commencement speech, providing a precise measure of the modesty of a school that has to pay for it.

At graduation ceremonies, some schools award degrees to students by department cohorts, provoking amateur sociological analysis and fashion critiques by those sitting up on the stage passing the time. At the University of Arts in Philadelphia, several of us noted the elegant beauty and animated grace of the graduates in dance compared to, say, the sculptors.

To make effective use of my visit to the school, I try to give a talk about my work a day or two before graduation and also meet with students and faculty in a round-table discussion, as the emotion of the occasion permits a certain frankness. One more chance to teach, to try to have consequences.

It is enlightening and even thrilling to meet the other honorary degree recipients. At Saint Joseph’s College, I was fortunate enough, up on stage as every graduate’s name was called out, to chat for an hour with Sister Helen Prejean (author of Dead Man Walking). Or meeting Don Knuth and George Miller and Nobel Prize winners in science at Williams College during the honorary-degree parties, when everyone is just glowing and I feel very lucky and happy to be included. Once the exchange of mutual admiration is over, it is possible to learn something if you ask good questions, listen carefully, and don’t party too much. And how excellent to be among those with whom you share the values, strategies, and responsibilities of creating new knowledge and new art.

Since the other recipients of honorary degrees are from fields other than one’s own, the usual within-field jealousies and competitive honor-counting are largely absent. Up to a point. John Kenneth Galbraith said his goal in picking up honorary degrees was to always have one more than his friend Arthur Schlesinger. (Honorary-degree stars such as John Hope Franklin, Joyce Carol Oates, and Stephen Jay Gould have dozens.) As Helen Prejean and I were marching out together after the ceremony, she kindly remarked, “Edward, you must do this rather often.” Since her powerful and witty commencement speech had already totally wiped out mine, I was alert to possibilities of further humiliation and finessed the matter by politely responding, “Not as often as you, Sister Helen.”

Honorary degrees have but one consequence beyond the pleasantries of graduation day: you will forever receive fund-raising pleas from the school. For years now, I have been an involuntary subscriber and constant reader of the Saint Joseph College Alumnae Magazine and many similar, where from time to time I check out the credentials of the more recent honorary-degree recipients.

Edward Tufte is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science at Yale University.