Why an Honorary PhD Would Leave Me Uncomfortable, Not Honoured
I’m not quite sure how to begin with… but you might’ve come across the term “Honoris Causa“—especially when a special academic honor is awarded to someone for their outstanding contribution to society. In simpler terms, this is often referred to as an Honorary Doctorate.
But if you ask me what I personally think of it… my answer is: it can be avoided and may be stopped sine die. To be honest, there are hundreds of honors that you can bestow upon someone for their extraordinary work, but will it look right if you are honoring a person whose actual academic record is not even close to postgraduate—forget PhD?
Isn’t it a disservice—or even tantamount to devaluing what actual PhD holders have earned through rigorous training, practical work, countless revisions, and burning the midnight oil night after night?
Now, someone can say that by that logic, you can’t give any honor to anyone because every honorary title denotes and has some hard work behind it. Exactly, that’s my point. But PhD is a different game altogether.
It’s innate. It’s focused. It’s passion. It’s a commitment & It’s a matter of life, blood, and entitlement.
An Academic Phd Is A Commitment to Oneself
Don’t get me wrong—I know that even any honor you may give to a person extraordinaire might seem incorrect or inappropriate in some contexts. But a PhD is different. Here, you’re giving someone a certificate and a title associated with the world’s highest academic degree—though in some countries, even post-PhD degrees are awarded and occasionally used to honor individuals of extraordinaire.
In every country, for honoring people, you always have specific honors to offer—like OBE in the UK, similarly, Order of Australia… and so on.
Similarly, in India, we have Bharat Ratna, Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan, and other so many specific professional and vocational honors relating to that discipline.
If any university truly wants to honor someone, then you don’t need to shower them with an honorary doctorate degree. Rather, you can give them a small memento or even a shawl or even a coffee table book or simply a big round of applause—I think that’s enough.
Doctorate Degrees Are Purely Academic
You don’t need to offer them higher academic degrees like PhD or D.Litt—both degrees are envied by students the world over with huge anticipation. Moreover, these honorary degrees don’t help those persons in any manner whatsoever.
They can neither use Dr. in their prefix, nor can they study in higher education showing that credential, or cite or say that they are a PhD degree holder—no matter how educated they are while writing or discussing something on a public forum.
Usually, I don’t want to go into specifics… but since I raised this issue today, I just want to highlight how erstwhile captains of the Indian cricket team (Senior Men’s), Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar, were offered honorary PhD degrees—but with full humility and respect, they politely declined the honour.
It shows the kind of thinking these legends have. They felt they shouldn’t accept an honour for which they hadn’t exerted any effort. They might be great players, but academically, they believed that awarding them an honorary PhD was an exaggeration—something grandiose and unnecessary. Today, you’ll rarely find anyone who would do that: politely reject an honorary PhD or higher degree for which they neither studied nor worked.
In Conclusion
After all, at the end of the day, education degrees aren’t something you can buy, be gifted, or have showered upon you. They can only be earned—through hard work, research, relentless effort, concentration, and focus.
And legends like Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid understand that. Not as an academic qualification, but as a matter of personal integrity.
