Honorary Degree Lottery

Within the next two or three weeks, the Committee on Honorary Degrees--a little-known branch of the Harvard Corporation--will finish its work for this year and submit to the Fellows a list of nominees for the 1974 Harvard honorary degrees.

The list will pass through the hands of the Fellows, the Overseers and the Corporation before it becomes final, and no nominee will get an honorary degree if he doesn't show up at the Commencement exercises in June.

Then after all the pomp and circumstance of Commencement dies away the whole process of selecting honorary degree recipients begins once again. It is, in a University as gossip-prone as Harvard, perhaps most noteworthy for the total secrecy in which it is conducted; only a small handful of University higher-ups know before Commencement who will get the degrees.

Each year the list of people being considered for honorary degrees is in the hundreds, so after Commencement the names of people who were considered but not picked goes back to the Committee on Honorary Degrees for a second look. The committee is made up of four respected senior faculty members, two Overseers and three Corporation members. The head of the committee for the last four years has been Albert L. Nickerson '33, a Corporation member.

"We try to give eight degrees a year, or sometimes more, but we always like to hold it below eleven or twelve," Nickerson says. "But that's a subjective figure; there are so many interesting people in the world. So every year we have a fat list of holdovers that we consider again."

The Committee keeps the holdover list but doesn't do much else until just before the beginning of the academic year, when the Corporation appoints the new members of the degree committee, President Bok, and the Fellows approve them. This year the committee members are Harvey Brooks, dean of the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics; David Riesman '31, Ford Professor of Social Sciences; Kenneth R. Andrews, David Professor of Business Administration; Franklin L. Ford, McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History; Amyas Ames '28 and Calvin H. Plimpton, both Overseers; and John Morton Blum '43 and Charles P. Slichter '45, members of the Corporation.

In mid-September, the committee starts soliciting suggestions for honorary degree recipients. It sends a letter to all tenured faculty and all administrators and places a notice in the Gazette, asking for names of possible degree recipients. Within a few weeks, the committee has a list of about 300 names to whittle down to the final eight to ten.

Nickerson vehemently denies that the committee chooses degree recipients in line with predetermined numbers of women, minority members or alumni. "We have no quotas," he says. "We would like a balance, but resist formula."

However, the committee does step down from the clouds sometimes to give special consideration to some Harvard people. Nickerson says the committee is "especially mindful of the great figures that have been associated with this university--presidents and deans and professors with enormous prestige are looked over carefully, though we try to resist giving degrees to people who are presently active."

Also, the committee loves to give a degree to someone whose "excellence" is not yet fully realized by the world at large. "We like to get people early on if they've shown sufficient promise," Nickerson says. "It's sad if every person we give a degree to is somebody who's gotten recognition before. Last year some of our most popular degree recipients had been recognized already--Georgia O'Keeffe and Margaret Mead, for example--but our faculty felt they hadn't received due recognition from the universities."

Not many people turn down the honor. Nickerson says there is about a 95 per cent acceptance rate and that nobody in his memory has ever turned down a Harvard honorary degree for anything other than reasons of health or prior committment. And nobody but the Corporation, the Fellows, the Overseers, Bok, the committee and the degree recipients knows who will get the degrees until the morning of Commencement.

The secrecy is a tradition and also helps make Commencement a drawing card for curious alumni who, Nickerson says, "always wonder who Harvard will honor." And of course there is always a great deal of speculation before Commencement on who the degree recipients will be. The best way to find out beforehand--though not totally reliable--is to check the registers of Boston and Cambridge hotels in early June for famous names, and to watch the newspapers for announcements of mysterious trips to Boston by American and foreign political leaders.

Of course, before early June, there's almost no way to find out the degree recipients except by pure guesswork and conjecture--but don't be surprised if Archibald Cox '34 ends up on the Commencement platform in June.