Thrown Out, Then Handed a Doctorate: A Horizontal-Vertical Analysis of the Honorary Degree

A university’s favorite performance is to wait until a person no longer needs a medal, then ceremonially drape them in a gown embroidered with the word “Doctor.”

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

Research date: May 2026

Field: higher education institutions / social and cultural phenomena

Subject type: institution / concept

1. One-sentence definition

A university’s favorite performance is to wait until a person no longer needs a medal, then ceremonially drape them in a gown embroidered with the word “Doctor.”

2. Vertical analysis: five hundred years, from exemption to PR tool

2.1 It was never about scholarship

From the moment the honorary doctorate was born, it had little to do with academics.

In 1478, Oxford gave a doctorate to Lionel Woodville, a man excused from every academic requirement by grace. Woodville was no great scholar. He was the brother-in-law of King Edward IV, then dean of Exeter Cathedral, and he held the political protection the university needed. Oxford gave him a degree; he gave Oxford security. A deal, as simple as that.

This is the earliest documented honorary doctorate.

Interestingly, the Latin phrase “honoris causa” first appears in Oxford’s official records only in 1651. In other words, the practice existed for at least 170 years before it had a name. For those 170 years, everyone knew what was going on. Nobody formally called it anything.

A medieval university degree was a license to teach (licentia docendi), originally issued under the monopoly of the Catholic Church. Applicants had to pass exams, swear loyalty, and pay fees. But from the very start there was a custom called “dispensatio” (exemption): for the powerful, for patrons, or for special figures, some or all of the usual requirements could be waived and the degree granted outright.

Exemption is the true origin of the honorary doctorate.

2.2 Charles I: degrees as candy

In 1642 the English Civil War broke out, and Charles I moved his court to Oxford to escape the Parliamentary army. To secure the university’s political loyalty and financial support, the king had it award about 350 honorary degrees to his entourage within just a few months (November 1642 to February 1643), including doctoral titles in every faculty.

1. In a few months.

The university finally had enough and petitioned the king, arguing that this damaged not only its reputation but also its finances, since candidates normally paid fees. It is the earliest recorded scandal of mass-produced honorary degrees, and the first time society began to think seriously about where the system’s limits lay.

From that moment on, the honorary doctorate has been pulled back and forth between two forces: the university’s instinct to protect its reputation, and the urge of the powerful to profit from academic endorsement. The tension has never really been resolved. It has only been given more respectable packaging.

2.3 America: who got the first honorary doctorate

In 1692 Harvard College awarded the first honorary degree in North America, to its own president, Increase Mather, as Doctor of Divinity. That was the peak year of the Salem witch trials, and history’s absurdity reached a strange density.

Harvard then awarded no doctorates for 79 years.

The model of “academic recognition in exchange for contributions to society” was truly set in 1753, when Harvard gave Benjamin Franklin an honorary Master of Arts. Franklin never went to college, but he had done enough to shape human civilization. Harvard gave him a degree; he gave Harvard a story: “See, we know great people.”

That logic of exchange has not changed since.

2.4 From nobles to capitalists: how the recipients changed

The 18th and 19th centuries were the honorary doctorate’s era of “great democratization.”

As the Industrial Revolution advanced and university education expanded, recipients widened from princes and nobles to scientists, artists, and philanthropists. Two forces drove this. First, there were more universities and fiercer competition, so they needed awards to raise their profile. Second, the middle class and industrial capitalists held real power in society, and universities had to bow to that power.

In 1897 the New York State Legislature banned universities from awarding honorary PhDs, to stop the spread of “fake doctors.” This directly caused an odd inflation of names: American universities renamed honorary doctorates “Doctor of Laws” (LL.D.), “Doctor of Humane Letters” (L.H.D.), and so on. The name changed; the logic did not. The doctorate was no longer called a PhD, but it appeared on business cards, entered speaker introductions, and became a legitimate source of the “Dr.” prefix.

2.5 The 20th century: honorary doctorates become a commencement staple

In the 20th century, the honorary doctorate completed its shift from “special custom” to “institutional routine.”

Harvard is the best indicator. Of its 171 documented honorary degrees, 110 (64%) were awarded in the past 15 years, rising from 2–3 a year to 9–10 a year. It is a clear acceleration, in step with university expansion, the media-ization of commencement, and the growing importance of the donation economy.

The honorary doctorate became commencement’s “celebrity guest” system: a famous person comes to speak, the university hands over a degree along the way, and everyone is happy.

2.6 The rebels: universities that say no

Not everyone accepted this logic.

The most famous rebel is MIT. From its first commencement in 1868 until today, MIT has never awarded a single honorary degree. The tradition comes from its founder, William Barton Rogers, who called honorary degrees “literary almsgiving of spurious merit and noisy popularity.” Rogers was influenced by Thomas Jefferson, who explicitly banned honorary degrees when he founded the University of Virginia. Stanford, Cornell, and Rice take the same position.

That explains why Steve Jobs gave his famous “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” speech at Stanford in 2005 without receiving an honorary doctorate. Plenty of people would have given him one; Stanford’s rules simply don’t allow it.

Interestingly, Jobs never accepted any honorary doctorate in his life, which is very rare among the top figures in tech. Some analyses suggest that part of the reason was his own lack of interest in ceremonial honors, and part was that his philanthropic giving was very limited, while honorary degrees are often closely tied to philanthropy.

2.7 The honorary doctorate’s three survival skills

Caught between academic dignity and the reality of survival, the modern honorary doctorate has developed a refined set of survival skills.

It drums up business for admissions: in 1996, Southampton College gave Kermit the Frog (of Sesame Street fame) an “honorary Doctor of Amphibious Letters,” which 31 newspapers covered, bringing the college a great deal of exposure and new applicants. It fills the treasury for the finance office: of the 60 honorary degrees the University of Vermont awarded from 2002 to 2012, 58% went to people with clear donation records in the previous ten years, totaling 13.6 million dollars, an average of 228,000 dollars each. Arthur E. Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia, said it plainly: “Honorary degrees serve two purposes, money and visibility, and are sometimes used to reward people who have given money.” And it serves as an unofficial protocol office for diplomacy: in 2019, during Putin’s visit to China, Tsinghua (Xi Jinping’s alma mater) gave him an honorary doctorate; that same year, when Xi visited Russia, Putin’s alma mater, Saint Petersburg State University, returned the favor. An exchange between heads of state is diplomatic protocol in academic wrapping.

All three functions run at once, stretching the university system to its limit between ideals and reality.

2.8 The wave of revocations: where are the system’s limits?

The other side of the honorary doctorate is revocation.

The largest revocation case is Bill Cosby. He received 72 honorary degrees in his lifetime. After his sexual assault scandal broke, 62 universities had announced revocations by 2018, a historical record: the University of Pennsylvania, Yale (its first revocation in 300 years), Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon…

Then there is Kanye West (Ye). The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) gave him an honorary doctorate in 2015 and revoked it in 2022 after he publicly praised Hitler and made numerous antisemitic remarks. It was the school’s first revocation in 80 years. An online petition gathered more than 4,000 signatures within days.

Revocation is the mirror image of awarding. Awarding says “I know this successful person.” Revoking says “I don’t know this toxic person.” Both serve the same purpose: protecting the institution’s own brand.

3. Horizontal analysis: who recognizes you, and for what

3.1 Where the honorary doctorate sits among honors

The honorary doctorate is a category of its own. It has no fields like the Nobel Prize, no jury system like the Oscars, no quantitative standard like the Forbes rankings. Every university is an independent awarding body with completely different criteria.

The table has one key problem: the honorary doctorate’s value is not fixed. It depends heavily on who gives it. An honorary doctorate from Harvard and one from an obscure college are, on paper, the same thing, and in practice entirely different. It is an honors system with “one name, many substances”: the name is standardized, while the value inside is completely decentralized.

Stranger still, it can be rejected by two kinds of institutions at once. Top engineering schools such as MIT and Stanford refuse to award it because they see it as “literary almsgiving” that harms academic seriousness. Some obscure small colleges award many because the more they give away, the more attention they get. Both extremes prove the same thing: the system has no agreed core value, and how different institutions use it reflects their own internal culture and interests, with no unified academic standard behind it.

3.2 One logic behind “different cultural attitudes”

The United States, Britain, Germany, Japan, China: on the surface their attitudes toward honorary doctorates differ widely, but peel back the skin and they are all doing the same thing, wrapping non-academic aims in academic language.

The United States awards the most. Of Harvard’s 171 recorded honorary degrees, 64% fall within the past 15 years, a clear acceleration in step with fundraising pressure. Britain has the most famous case of refusal: on January 29, 1985, Oxford voted 738 to 319 to deny Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher an honorary doctorate. This was no defense of academic purity. It was a collective protest by Oxford academics against the government’s cuts to education funding, expressed through this channel. The honorary doctorate became a political weapon. Refusing can sometimes carry more force than giving.

In Germany, honorary doctorates are governed by each state’s higher education law, must follow strict criteria, and holders must use the form “Dr. h.c.” Kyoto University in Japan has awarded only 8 so far, nearly all to Nobel-level scientists. In China, Tsinghua gave one to Putin, Putin’s alma mater Saint Petersburg State University returned one to Xi Jinping, and King Saud University gave Xi an honorary doctorate for “advancing China–Saudi relations.” This is diplomatic protocol with new wrapping.

The standards differ, but the underlying logic is identical: universities use academic titles to do non-academic things. The only difference is whether the aim is fundraising, political expression, or diplomatic protocol.

3.3 A map of “dropouts crowned doctor by the same kind of institution”

The list is longer than most people think:

Bill Gates, Harvard mathematics, dropped out in his junior year in 1975. On June 7, 2007, Harvard gave him a Doctor of Laws (LL.D.). At the ceremony he joked: “I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.”

Mark Zuckerberg, also Harvard, dropped out in his sophomore year in 2005. In 2017 Harvard gave him a Doctor of Laws. Returning 12 years after dropping out, he became one of the youngest honorees in Harvard’s history. After getting the invitation, he called Gates, a fellow Harvard dropout, for advice on giving a commencement speech.

R. Buckminster Fuller, Harvard, was expelled twice. The first time for spending his money partying with a vaudeville troupe; the second time, after being readmitted, he was thrown out again for “irresponsibility and lack of interest.” In the end he received 47 honorary doctorates in his lifetime. Harvard never gave him an honorary doctorate, but in 1961 it invited him to be the Norton visiting professor, and on his 50th class anniversary it elected him an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa. The institution made peace another way.

Ted Turner, Brown University classics, was expelled for letting his girlfriend stay in his dorm room. Brown gave him an honorary bachelor’s degree in 1989 and an honorary doctorate in 1993, and invited him to give the commencement address.

Elton John entered London’s Royal Academy of Music on a scholarship at 11, studied there for six years, and left without formally graduating. In 2002 the Royal Academy gave him an honorary doctorate, making him one of the first two honorary doctors in its 180-year history. He received a doctoral title from the school he never graduated from.

Jensen Huang is not a dropout. He graduated from Oregon State University with highest honors and later earned a master’s from Stanford. But his story belongs to the same type: surviving at the edge of the system, underestimated by it, proving everything through action, and then being crowned doctor by it. At 15 he washed dishes at Denny’s. He co-founded NVIDIA with 600 dollars, and the company once hovered 30 days from bankruptcy. After NVIDIA’s market value passed 3 trillion dollars, top universities around the world lined up to give him degrees: Oregon State University (2009), National Taiwan University (2020), the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2024), Linköping University in Sweden (2025), and Carnegie Mellon University (2026).

What the people on this list share is not “dropping out.” It is “first underestimated or excluded by the system, later recognized by it after the fact.”

3.4 The forgotten group: the people actually grinding through a doctorate

One group is silent at all these ceremonies: the people who spend five or six years in the lab, survive their defense, get pushed around by their advisors, and earn a real PhD.

When Ted Turner stood on stage at Brown in a doctoral gown, how many people in the audience had spent five years earning the same gown? When Taylor Swift received a doctorate in fine arts from New York University in 2022, how did the NYU doctoral students in their thirties, still writing dissertations and living on thin stipends, feel?

This kind of “academic line-cutting” is not free. It dilutes the signal value of the doctorate as proof of academic training. The real problem is not that universities give degrees to celebrities. It is that they use one symbol for two completely different things: that you went through systematic academic training, and that you are famous or gave a lot of money.

Using one word for two different things will sooner or later drain the word of meaning.

4. Where the two axes meet

4.1 Institutional recognition is not an apology

Put the vertical history and the horizontal phenomena side by side, and one thing becomes very clear:

The honorary doctorate has never been a system for “recognizing the future.” It is a ritual for “ratifying the past.”

Woodville got his in 1478 because he already held power. Franklin got his in 1753 because he had already proved himself. Gates got his in 2007 because he had already been the world’s richest man for more than a decade. No university gives an honorary doctorate to someone who still has nothing. The honorary doctorate is a result, not a prediction.

Universities are among the most conservative institutions in human society. Their job is to pass on known knowledge, and betting on an unknown future falls outside it. So they always hand over the honor once a person “no longer needs it.”

During the years Jensen Huang washed dishes at Denny’s, no university knew he existed. In the 1990s, when NVIDIA was on the brink of bankruptcy, no university called him. Only after the GPU became the infrastructure of the AI era, and NVIDIA’s market value exceeded the GDP of most countries, did universities around the world start lining up.

So when a university awards an honorary doctorate, it is not “admitting it misjudged him back then.” It never misjudged him, because it never looked at him in the first place. What it does now is seize an opportunity the market has fully validated and give itself the label “I know successful people.”

This is marketing, not an apology.

4.2 Two timelines, one permanent mismatch

To understand the phenomenon, look at two timelines separately.

The institution’s timeline is: establish value, then grant recognition. This line always lags, because establishing value needs consensus, consensus needs time, and institutional consensus is especially slow.

The individual’s timeline is: sense the opportunity, act, create value. This line leads. In 1992 Jensen Huang had already made the call that “PCs will eventually need dedicated 3D graphics hardware,” when most people had not yet seen it.

The gap between the two lines is exactly the space the honorary doctorate occupies.

From the perspective of Everett Rogers’s “diffusion of innovations” theory, universities are a classic “late majority” or even “laggard”: they formally embrace an innovation only after society has fully validated it. The honorary doctorate is the far end of the S-shaped diffusion curve, a ritual of “you’ve already won, and now we announce it.”

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn writes that a new paradigm often truly wins not by persuading the guardians of the old one, but by waiting for those guardians to leave the stage. The honorary doctorate is a rare exception: it is a ritual in which the old institution actively announces “I accept this new paradigm,” without waiting for the old guard to age out.

This “active announcement” has a cost: at that moment, the institution admits the limits of its ability to read the direction of its time. But the cost is hidden, because on the surface the one giving the degree is the active party, and nobody notices the subtext: “You no longer need our recognition, and we came anyway.”

4.3 Those who refused

Throughout history a number of people have turned down honorary doctorates, and they deserve their own section.

George Bernard Shaw refused a Doctor of Laws from the University of Edinburgh, writing in his reply: “To confer a doctorate of law on me would be an insult to me and to the law.”

H. L. Mencken stated publicly: “No decent man would accept a degree he hadn’t earned.” After that, no one invited him again.

The act of refusal is another kind of statement: “I don’t need your recognition.” It carries more force than acceptance, because it declares a system of self-assessment independent of the institution. It says: my value is not yours to define.

Jobs never accepting an honorary doctorate may be an extension of the same logic. Whether a person can say “I don’t need it” has nothing to do with whether they deserve recognition. What it measures is how much they depend on outside recognition.

4.4 What “thrown out, then handed a doctorate” means

Back to the original question: why do people who were expelled or dropped out end up receiving doctorates from the same kind of institution?

What universities confer through degrees has never been “scholarship.” It has always been “social recognition.”

When someone drops out to start a company and eventually creates enormous social value, he has already accumulated a huge amount of “social recognition.” The honorary doctorate merely converts that informal recognition into a formal symbol within the academic system.

Ted Turner was expelled from Brown, then thirty years later stood at Brown’s commencement in a doctoral gown. Emotionally the scene is dramatic, but logically it is entirely consistent: one of a university’s core functions is to provide identity markers for society’s elite. Once a person has become part of that elite, the university naturally wants to put its own label on them.

The university did not admit a mistake. It did what it has always done: recognize power. Only this time, power took the form of market value and influence, where it once took the form of birth and title.

4.5 Scenarios for the future

Most likely: honorary doctorate inflation in the AI era

As leaders in AI rise, honorary doctorates will keep coming faster. Jensen Huang received degrees from five or six top universities within six years. Sam Altman received the first honorary doctorate ever awarded by MBZUAI in Abu Dhabi: a new university of the AI era defining itself through an iconic figure of the AI era.

There is an internal logic to this acceleration: AI’s influence spreads faster than any previous technology, so the lag before universities catch up is shrinking. An industrial-era merchant once had to wait decades for university recognition; an AI founder may now wait only a few years.

The value keeps diluting as a result. When everyone has one, nobody cares.

Most dangerous: moral liability builds to a tipping point

The Cosby case is a warning. Sixty-two universities spent heavy administrative resources on revocations and also had to manage PR crises. As social moral standards shift quickly, the risk universities take when awarding honorary doctorates keeps rising.

The deeper question is: when the moral standard itself is contested, who holds the power to revoke? The Kanye West case was not controversial, because there is a clear enough social consensus against antisemitism. But if murkier cases arise, say a tech leader with strong political views who has broken no law, universities will face harder choices. Revoking may anger half the public; not revoking may anger the other half.

Most optimistic: the honorary doctorate becomes a call to action

In May 2025, when Chris Klaus accepted an honorary doctorate from Georgia Tech, he announced he would cover startup costs for every graduate that day. The honorary doctorate shifted from “thank you for what you once did” to “let’s do something together.”

If the honorary doctorate can evolve from a one-way “we recognize you” into a two-way “we create together,” it stops being only a ritual and becomes a real catalyst.

But that is still rare. At most honorary doctorate ceremonies, the honoree puts on the gown, gives a speech, takes the gown off, and both sides go their separate ways. The institution keeps running, and next year it finds the next one.

5. Sources

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Methodology

This piece uses Horizontal-Vertical Analysis. The method was proposed by Khazix (数字生命卡兹克) and combines the core ideas of Saussure’s diachronic-synchronic analysis, the longitudinal and cross-sectional research designs of social science, the business-school case method, and competitive strategy analysis: the vertical axis follows depth in time, the horizontal axis follows breadth at one moment, and judgment emerges where they meet.