Northwestern Rescinds Wright's Honorary Degree

NEAL CONAN, host:

Honorary degrees do not enjoy all that much honor. Playwright Neil Simon, upon receiving his honorary degree from Williams College, remarked that the distinction has its limitations. Quote, "Would you let an honorary mechanic fix your Mercedes?" Nevertheless, the tradition that began in the 15th century not only continues, it proliferates.

In this week's edition of the Weekly Standard, contributing editor Joseph Epstein wrote about the honorary pickle at Northwestern University, where he taught for 30 years, when the school first offered, and later rescinded, a degree to the now notorious Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Joseph Epstein joins us now from the studios of Northwestern. He's also a recipient of an honorary degree himself from Adelphi University in Long Island. Nice to have you on the program today, Doctor.

Mr. JOSEPH EPSTEIN (Contributing Editor, Weekly Standard): Yes, call me doctor once more and I'll punch you out.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. EPSTEIN: Watch out who you're calling doctor, buddy.

CONAN: Of course, we want to hear from those of you in the audience with an honorary degree. What's it worth to you? Our phone number is 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org You can also join the conversation on our blog at npr.org/blogofthenation. So, Joseph Epstein, you're there on the campus. Everybody at Northwestern still talking about the honorary embarrassment?

Mr. EPSTEIN: I don't think as much as they did a week or so ago. But the embarrassment is one of those - I suppose we now say in a cliche today - defining moments for honorary degrees. What happened was that someone at Northwestern decided that there's this interesting African-American character who's an activist name Jeremiah Wright. Why don't we give him an honorary degree? After all, everybody's done all the - Maya Angelous, the Bill Cosbys, the John Hope Franklins. Here's an original figure, let's do this.

And then lo, Reverend Wright goes and does something silly. Not by saying I love you, but by saying what he said, which everyone knows, that the government caused AIDS to black poor people and so forth and so on. Northwestern found itself, as you say, in a pickle. Deep in the brine of pickle-juice, in fact. And the President decided that he had better withdraw the invitation to Reverend Wright. Saying that graduation is after all a celebratory event and the Reverend's controversial status would somehow explode the celebratory nature of the event into a kind of political awfulness, and they had to withdraw it, which, I think, must have been embarrassing all the way around.

CONAN: You pointed out in your piece in the Weekly Standard that there are a couple of institutions, at least, who gave honorary degrees at one point to Robert Mugabe who may regret it now.

Mr. EPSTEIN: Exactly. I think what's happened with honorary degrees, it was once rather a grand ritual that has lost its grandeur over the years. I think maybe, you know, the two greatest doctors who were honorary doctors are Dr. Franklin, Benjamin Franklin, who got his for his scientific endeavors, and Dr. Samuel Johnson, who got his for his scholarship, the great dictionary and so forth.

Somebody sent me an email after this piece appeared, telling me something I didn't know, and that is in 1792, Oxford offered an honorary doctorate to Joseph Haydn, who in recompense for the doctorate wrote the Oxford Symphony, one of his great, you know, batch of London symphonies. And the next century the University of Breslau did something similar to Brahms, and Brahms wrote the academic festival overture. So that's a case of honorary doctorates paying off very well.

CONAN: It's better than the usual 20-minute speech.

Mr. EPSTEIN: Exactly, exactly. Now, not everyone who gets an honorary doctorate gives a speech. Having someone famous, I guess, receive an honorary doctorate is a way of getting a speech on the cheap, I should think.

CONAN: Yeah, I thought that the honorary doctorate was in fact for finding the most famous person who is willing to give a speech for free.

Mr. EPSTEIN: That's it. I see you need to be in research and development here at the university.

CONAN: I should be. In fact there's a funny story you tell in your piece about well, somebody who was going to be the commencement speaker, had to pull out at the last minute apparently got sick or something. Somebody called you and offered you the slot.

Mr. EPSTEIN: Yes he did and he offered a small fee I should say, to give the commencement speech. And at the end of it he said, and of course we'll toss in an honorary degree. I was so charmed by that toss in, I say - I wanted to say, I didn't have wit to say it at the time. How about tossing in instead a window, a rear-window defogger, or maybe radial tires, you know, toss in. I'm afraid that's what it's come to.

CONAN: This idea, though, as you suggest when it started out was rather grand, a way to honor people, relatively few people in the 15th century got the chance to go to university.

Mr. EPSTEIN: Absolutely, and what it honored, for the most part, was science, scholarship and art. The University of Chicago, as far as I know, is perhaps the only school that has the strict rule of still only giving honorary degrees to scientists, scholars and, less frequently, artists. And in fact there was an instance there where Bill Clinton sort of invited himself, as I guess politicians do, to give a commencement address there, and the university agreed to give him the commencement address but only if he understood he would not get an honorary degree.

So I think that keeping it strict like that is a useful thing. Not everyone can do it because I think in given honorary degrees other motives are at work. Not least among - one is among them is to show that you're political all right. That you're giving degrees according to the new diversity pattern, so therefore you must be an African-American, must be woman, must be a Jewish character, must be everyone. It's not greed.

The other thing that happens I think is a lot of people give honorary degrees, a lot of universities, in the hope of getting money back and so degrees are given to wealthy businessmen. I had a friend Sol Linowitz, you may remember, was the chairman of Xerox, and he also was a diplomat under Lyndon Johnson. He was a kind of perfect candidate, a man who had done good things it the world and was very wealthy. And Sol told me he had 64 such honorary degrees, he told me with a chuckle.

(Soundbite of laughter)

CONAN: He had a lot of cowls.

Mr. EPSTEIN: He had cowls all over the joint, all over the wall.

CONAN: That's one thing you do get to take home in addition to a certificate is the cowl.

Mr. EPSTEIN: It's true. Cowl is sort of a little piece of silk cloth that goes over your gown.

CONAN: Let's see if we can get some listeners involved in the conversation. Have you received an honorary degree and what do you use it for? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email is talk@npr.org Let's begin with Mark and Mark's calling us from Kansas City

MARK (Caller): Hi, apropos to your conversation I was in St. Louis in Washington University, my alma mater, on Friday when Phyllis Schlafly received a somewhat controversial honorary doctorate of letters. I'm a kid who graduated in the '60s and '70s so it was to meet the students who gave us white armbands, and when the Schlafly got her award about four or 5,000 of us stood up and turned our backs. Very effective.

CONAN: And hardly the first kind of protest that's ever been thrown an honorary doctorate's way.

MARK: No, absolutely not. I found her comments sort of interesting. She said, it was the AP reported that she said all the people that turned around their backs to me were too immature to graduate. I think she missed the point of academic freedom. ...

•	Northwestern Rescinds Wright's Honorary Degree NPR - Talk of the Nation, Tuesday, May 20, 2008 Byline: Neal Conan, host