Last month Roger Federer gave a thoughtful, penetrating and inspirational Commencement Address at Dartmouth College that quickly rippled around the world.
That was a very good thing. That he did so as the holder of an honorary doctorate, on the other hand, was most definitely not, and should give us all pause.
Before the millions (billions?) of global Federer lovers descend on me with e-truncheons, I’d like to quickly point out that this is hardly an anti-Federer screed. Indeed, you’d be hard pressed to find a more avid Federer fan than I am: I’ve followed (and played) tennis for most of my life, and have never witnessed a player more exhilarating to watch, and I’m quite convinced that I never will.
Moreover, the class and grace that he consistently demonstrated both on and off the court throughout his entire (happily very lengthy) career is, I believe, a tribute to the power of sports generally, tangibly demonstrating that the highest levels of competitive excellence can be fully resonant with respect for others and fundamental decency (a notion that tennis, in particular, often significantly struggled with before the Federer era).
And then there are his deeply impressive philanthropic activities, which he began at a precipitously young age after having quickly established himself as a global sporting icon. I don’t pretend to know Mr Federer, whom I’ve never met; but so far as I can tell his only visible negative characteristic is a conspicuous lack of negative characteristics.
So what’s my problem?
Well, simply this: that anyone who dropped out of school at the age of 16 to dedicate his life to thwacking fuzzy spheroids shouldn’t receive an honorary doctorate from anywhere, let alone an Ivy League institution that purports to represent the highest levels of research and scholarship.
Whenever I contemplate the question of honorary degrees (which isn’t often, you might be surprised to learn), the first person who pops into my head is the wonderfully iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman, who trenchantly wrote, when gently declining his first offer of an honorary degree,
I remember the work I did to get a real degree at Princeton and the guys on the same platform receiving honorary degrees without work—and felt an ‘honorary degree’ was a debasement of the idea of a degree which confirms certain work has been accomplished. It’s like giving an ‘honorary electrician’s license.’
As usual, Feynman (whose world-leading contributions to research and scholarship were undebatable) was brilliantly on point. By offering an honorary degree, a university is bestowing its most meaningful resource, its public endorsement of academic achievement, to someone who hasn’t actually earned it, thereby simultaneously devaluing both everyone who has and the institution itself.
Imagine, say, if the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club decided that they would retroactively elevate Federer to co-champion for 2019, thereby giving him a record-setting 9th Wimbledon title. After all, he was twice only one point away from winning that final match (and on his serve, too—the memory still burns), and virtually everyone on the planet who wasn’t of Serbian descent was fervently hoping that he would do so.
Clearly, we would all find such a decision simply preposterous—likely Federer most of all, who would surely decline the offer. Because if Wimbledon trophies were given to those who didn’t actually win them, we would be transparently degrading the efforts of those celebrated few (including, of course, Federer himself) who had legitimately managed to do so.
Wait, you might say—Federer didn’t get his honorary degree because of his tennis, he got it, we’re told (a “Doctor of Humane Letters”), for his philanthropic work. Surely that makes his “doctorate” well-earned?
Well, no. Aside from the obvious fact that an integral aspect of his philanthropic foundation’s success is the fact that he was one of the most successful tennis players in history, the vastly more significant point is that universities are neither independent assessors of philanthropic impact nor, more generally, of moral probity.
You don’t get a college degree of any sort, and most certainly not a doctorate, for being a good or generous person (indeed, as someone who used to be an academic administrator, I can assure you that there is a far better case in the opposite direction): you get it for engaging in research and scholarship at a sufficiently high level.
And if universities somehow were in the business of recognizing philanthropic activity (which they’re clearly not), shouldn’t they be basing their decisions on which ones to officially appreciate based upon the amount donated or the level of impact of said philanthropic activities, rather than the name-recognition or awe-inspiring backhand of the philanthropist?
But that’s not what universities are all about, of course. The reason Federer felt so obviously overwhelmed in Dartmouth was not because he was simply picking up an award for his philanthropic foundation, but because he was appearing in his very own academic gown as a newly anointed representative of a prestigious institution of research and scholarship.
That he should have had the opportunity to address Dartmouth’s Class of 2024 and offer them guidance and life lessons from his own experience was wholly appropriate (and he did it, unsurprisingly, very well). But doing so as Dr Federer was decidedly not.
Now you might think that all of this is nitpicking; and to a certain extent it certainly is. Out of all the societal problems we’re currently grappling with, the prospect of a supremely accomplished and charismatic athlete being publicly, if inappropriately, rewarded for his efforts must be phenomenally low down on the list.
But here’s the thing. A key factor underlying so many genuinely pressing concerns these days is a precipitous decline in critical thinking skills; and whatever your particular views on what the role of the modern university might be, “improving critical thinking skills” surely plays a prominent part. Yet in an age when those very universities are hopelessly mired in overtly incoherent and inappropriate actions, frantically leveraging whatever remains of their scholarly reputations in order to gain media attention, how, on earth, are things going to get any better?
Howard Burton, July 16, 2024
Howard is the Director of Pandemic Perspectives (2022), Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration (2023), Raphael: A Portrait (2024) and Botticelli’s Primavera (2025) which is the first film in our Renaissance Masterpieces Series. He is also the author of 6 non-fiction books.
Howard was the Founding Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI). His book, First Principles: Building Perimeter Institute includes a foreword by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose and tells the remarkable and unconventional story of founding PI.
Memories of Feynman features Nobel Laureate David Politzer, Nima Arkani-Hamed, Artur Ekert, Paul Steinhardt & Rocky Kolb.
