The Semi Weekly Messenger

HONORARY DEGREES
Ridiculous Excess of the Colleges Bringing Practice Into Contempt.

This is the season in which the 500 chartered colleges, more or less, with which the country is blessed, distribute honorary scholastic degrees so lavishly that they are becoming as lightly regarded here as they long have been abroad. Only a few of these institutions are known even by name to the great body of educated foreigners and the names of many of them would not be recognized by most educated Americans. Of course most of these are colleges only in name, their actual standing for the greater part being simply that of high schools, whose faculties are composed, not of professors, but school teachers, and not always first rate teachers at that. Yet if they have been clothed by state legislatures with the power to grant degrees their D. D.'s and LL. D.'s are as unassailably genuine as those of any real college or university in the land.

It seems as if this indiscriminate bestowing of honorary degrees had reached a point where a halt should be called if such honors are not to be laughed out of existence. To a man really worthy of such distinction the college degree means little or nothing, though the college itself may gain a certain measure of repute when proper care is exercised in selecting the recipients of such honors. It is not unfrequently the case that a college honors itself in honoring a really distinguished man, be he alumnus or not; but this haphazard bestowal of degrees can result if it has not already, only in making all degrees ridiculous. Next week, for instance, a little denominational college in New England will confer no less than fifty-four honorary degrees. How little real value these will have is apparent. Last week in this city a very few and very carefully selected men received these degrees from Western Reserve, and the irredeemable injustice follows, that, save in the eyes of the discriminating few, both classes of recipients will stand on the same level.

The long and short of the matter seems to be what everybody can have nobody wants, and no man is distinguished by an honorary degree which is showered indiscriminately at every commencement upon battalions of mediocrities. It is not easy though, to see what can be done about it. If the evil is to be reformed altogether and at once either the colleges must cease to grant these degrees or the designated recipients must decline them with thanks. Neither outcome is immediately probable. The consoling fact remains, however, that the greater the colleges the fewer, generally speaking, are its honorary degrees. If the small colleges shall seek to emulate the real ones in this as in so many other respects the honorary doctorate humbug will become by degrees less pervading.

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