28 August—Yesterday, I received a press release purportedly from the Arab Translators Association announcing “opening of applications for an honorary doctorate.” A link was provided for the submission of applications. The link was not to the Arab Translators Association and I don’t intend to find out where it would have taken me or what it would have done. I received the mailing because I was allegedly “subscribed to the Google Groups ‘Taajiron’ group,” according to the email. That was news to me. Obviously spam that made it through the filters and who knows what else.

But the Arab Translators Association appears to be for real. At least it has a website that’s nowhere mentioned or linked in the spam email. The website tells us, “The Arab Translators Association (ArtA) is an entity that emerged from the womb of her predecessor, the International Association of Translators and Linguists Arabs (WATA) which was founded on 1/1/2004 by the founder of this association, Mr. Amer Al-Azm, and continued till 2010. The Arab Translators Association (ArtA) has more than (5000) members of translators and interpreters from all over the world since its founding in 2020.” Delightfully organic imagery not atypical of Oriental literature.

Having thus been parturiated from the womb of her predecessor, the ArtA now works out of Amman, Jordan. No surprise that I couldn’t find any mentions of or links to applications for honorary doctorates on the website.

But who ever heard of applying for honorary doctorates anyway? Of course it’s done, but under the table by people like politicians and by giving universities big bucks. While those aren’t technically applications, that’s certainly what they are. And, believe it or not, non-applicants—including politicians and potentially generous benefactors—have been turned down by wealthy universities.

In 1985, for instance, as a deliberate (and typically Oxonian) snub, Oxford University refused to give Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, an alumna of the university’s Somerville College, an honorary degree, to protest her government’s cuts in funding for higher education. Honorary doctorates had previously been given to all prime ministers who had been educated at Oxford. The university’s chancellor at the time was former Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who was 91 at the time and died a year later.

Then, in 2000, Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair, a St. John’s College alumnus, got a similar Oxford snub for his inept government’s assault on phantom blue-brick (Oxford and Cambridge) elitism, even though the university’s chancellor, Woy Jenkins, was a distinguished and venerated Labor politician and mentor of Blair’s. He was only 80 at the time and died a couple of years later.

In 2009, Arizona State University president Michael Crow refused to give an honorary degree to U.S. President Barack Obama because of Obama’s lack of adequate qualifying achievements. (That hasn’t changed, when you think about it.) Crow himself had earned a doctorate from Syracuse University in 1985 and received an honorary doctorate from Iowa State University in 2008. He’s just begun his 20^th year as ASU president.

On the other hand, in 1996, Long Island University awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Amphibious Letters to Kermit the Frog in recognition of his efforts in environmentalism. . . .