Why Do Colleges Give Honorary Degrees?

They spend time talking about celebrities because that will improve the SEO results of the article. They have substantial, original content that mentions famous people.

Journalism is dead. We're now just fodder for the "article hackers" whose job it is to get page views. There are different ways to do this for different audiences; this is the snobbish academic equivalent of a Buzzfeed article titled "15 Signs You Totally Have VD".

Being successful =/= Being rich

And while being successful or making an outstanding contribution is a way to get an honorary degree, it is easier still to just buy one.

I think there is a case to be made for honorary degrees, but not with how they are commonly used today. To me it makes sense that if someone becomes one of the utmost authorities in a field, but didn't do it by spending half a million dollars and many good years at an Ivy League school, you can still recognize their credibility through an honorary degree.

The same wikipedia article goes on to say

[these academies] are to be distinguished from the Western-style university which is an autonomous organization of scholars that originated in medieval Europe and was adopted in other world regions since the onset of modern times

For specific examples, here's MIT's policy, from http://libguides.mit.edu/c.php?g=176367&p=1159444#13351783 :

> Who holds ownership of the copyright to my thesis?

> In most cases the Institute will hold ownership of the copyright to a thesis. In general, students may retain ownership of thesis copyrights when the only form of support is from (1) teaching assistantships (the duties of which do not include research activities) and (2) NSF and NIH traineeships and fellowships (although the trainee or fellow may be required to grant certain publishing rights to NSF or NIH). See the current Specifications for Thesis Preparation for more details.

> Students may request a waiver of the Institute’s copyrights by written application to the Institute’s Technology Licensing Office (NE25-230).

Here's information about the copyright for a Harvard PhD, from https://www.physics.harvard.edu/uploads/files/grads/forms/um... :

> You may choose either open access or traditional publishing. If you choose Open Access Publishing, the published version of your dissertation or thesis will always be available for free download to anyone who has access to the Internet. The Traditional Publishing option works on a standard copy-sales and royalty-payments model. We sell copies of your work (in any format) and pay royalties as described in the Publishing Agreement. Either option gets your graduate research out where other scholars can find and use it through the ProQuest® Dissertations and Theses (PQDT) database, subscribed to by more than 3000 libraries worldwide.

Or to pick a non-Boston-area school, here are open access PhD these from Florida State - http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/etd/ .

Stallman has an honorary degree from the University of Glasgow. Pulling up the first PhD thesis from http://theses.gla.ac.uk/cgi/latest I see "Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author." The same is true from the couple of other theses I looked at.

He also has an honorary degree from Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology. I pulled up three PhD thesis from http://www.kth.se/en/ict/forskning/ickretsar/publikationer/r... . Two of them had a copyright statement by the PhD candidate, one had no explicit statement.

So it's not the case that thesis copyright transfer is a major issue preventing Stallman from getting a PhD.