A BriefLook at Honorary Degrees
A BriefLook at Honorary Degrees
COMMENCEMENT
A The degree awarded to tennis star Arthur Ashe in 1980 was auctioned off in 2013 for $145.
Cornell is the only Ivy school that does not award honorary degrees.
Faculty protested the granting of an honorary degree to George H.W. Bush in 2011 with a letter to President Jim Kim: “We believe his record as a politician is difficult to reconcile with the values for which Dartmouth stands.”
The first Dartmouth honorary degrees were awarded in 1773. Among the 19 recipients was Ralph Wheelock, the Yale-educated son of Dartmouth founder Eleazar Wheelock.
Y Nine U.S. presidents have received honorary degrees. The first was John Adams, in 1782.
A In 1922, author and education reformer Dorothy Canfield Fisher became the first woman to receive | an honorary degree from Dartmouth.
In a thank-you note to President John Sloan Dickey ’29, honorary degree recipient E.B. White expressed his "appreciation to you for including ‘brevity’ among my alleged virtues; I have found that in many academic circles it is regarded with distrust.”
President James 0. Freedman once wrote of an alum who, year after year, “brazenly approached me with requests for a degree, always supplying an exhaustive resume and fistfuls of adulatory articles. He never was honored.”
Robert Frost, class of 1896, and Nelson Rockefeller ’30 are the only people to receive two honorary degrees from the College.
This year’s honorary degree recipients: Jake Tapper ’91, Anna Deavere Smith, Jim Sinegal, Frances Arnold, Dottie and Bob King ’57, Shaikha Dana Nasser Sabah Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah, C. Fordham von Reyn’67 and Abbey D’Agostino ’14.
A New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt (with Dartmouth President Ernest Martin Hopkins, class of 1901) received an honorary degree in 1929.
A This year Tapper becomes the latest alum to receive an honorary degree as the Commencement speaker. Others have included Stephen Bosworth ’61, Henry Paulson ’68, Louise Erdrich 76, Fred Rogers ’50 and Shonda Rhimes ’91.
