The Purpose and Significance of Honorary Degrees

An honorary degree — almost always styled as a doctorate — is sometimes described with the Latin honoris causa (“for the sake of the honor”) or ad honorem (“to the honor”). Because a university is, in effect, publicly aligning itself with whoever it chooses, the choice is never purely ceremonial: it says something about the institution’s own priorities and values, and it occasionally invites pushback when a choice is contested.

The practice is old. The earliest recorded honorary degree is generally traced to Lionel Woodville, awarded by Oxford in the 15th century. Harvard and Yale both began the practice not long after their founding, in the late 1600s and early 1700s respectively. At most American universities, the process by which nominees are chosen is deliberately opaque, with the winning names typically kept under wraps until they’re announced — often alongside an invitation to deliver the commencement address.

Yale’s own description of the honor captures the underlying logic well: honorary degree recipients are meant to serve as models for graduating students — people whose lives exemplify the kind of excellence, curiosity, and public-mindedness the university hopes its own graduates will pursue.

In recent years, both schools’ honoree lists have leaned further into figures working on social justice, environmental science, and global public health — a shift that reflects, at least in part, how these institutions currently think about their broader civic role.

How Harvard Selects Nominees

The Harvard Corporation’s Role

Harvard has described its own criterion plainly: honorary degrees go to candidates based on their overall, lifetime body of contributions and accomplishments. A standing subcommittee of the Harvard Corporation — the university’s senior governing board — reviews candidates and narrows the field before bringing a shortlist to the full Corporation, where approval is typically unanimous.

From there, the list goes to the Board of Overseers, Harvard’s second governing board, for final confirmation. Harvard typically selects around ten honorees a year, and recipients are expected to attend Commencement in person to receive the degree.

As with Yale, the names are held back until Commencement. In spring 2026, Harvard honored five recipients — on the smaller end of its usual range.

The Role of the Board of Overseers

The Board of Overseers — one of Harvard’s two governing boards, made up of alumni elected annually — provides a check on the Corporation’s nominations rather than originating them. The Corporation proposes candidates; the Overseers must concur before a degree is finalized. This two-board structure is characteristic of how Harvard splits governance more broadly, not something unique to honorary degrees.

Because Overseers are elected directly by Harvard’s alumni body, they bring a different vantage point than the Corporation, which has historically been criticized as more insular and self-selecting in how its own members are chosen.

Historical Context

Harvard’s first honorary degree dates to 1692, and the list of recipients since then spans presidents, foreign dignitaries, scientists, artists, and philanthropists. Individual choices have periodically drawn criticism — sometimes over a recipient’s politics, sometimes over conduct that came to light after the fact — and the university’s vetting process has tightened over time partly in response to that history.

How Yale Selects Nominees

No Formal Criteria, But High Standards

Yale doesn’t publish a fixed checklist of criteria. Instead, the university describes recipients collectively as people who “represent… the aspirations of this institution” — individuals recognized for genuinely distinctive, field-defining contributions, chosen in part because their example might inspire the graduating class.

The Committee Structure

Yale’s Committee on Honorary Degrees draws its members from several parts of the university: the Yale Corporation (the governing board, which has final say via formal vote), the Association of Yale Alumni, the University Council, and the faculty. The committee meets annually to work through the pool of candidates.

• Corporation representatives – Yale’s governing board, which formally votes on the final selections
• AYA representatives – bringing alumni perspective into the process
• University Council representatives – an advisory body drawn from across the Yale community
• Faculty representatives – spanning multiple schools and disciplines

That mix is meant to keep the process from reflecting any single constituency’s preferences too heavily.

The Yale Connection

Yale typically awards eight or nine honorary degrees a year, and it’s common for one to three of them to have an existing Yale degree already. But a prior connection to Yale isn’t a prerequisite — many honorees have none.

The committee has, at times, chosen to recognize people with real but lower-profile public impact, rather than sticking exclusively to already-famous names.

The Role of the Secretary’s Office

Each year, the process starts with Yale’s Office of the Secretary reaching out to faculty and other constituencies — including AYA board members and Corporation fellows — to solicit nominations. Nominations aren’t restricted to a formal channel; unsolicited suggestions from alumni are common too.

Historical Examples

Yale’s list of past honorees includes well-known instances of the committee getting ahead of a story — recognizing Wangari Maathai and Muhammad Yunus with honorary degrees before either had won a Nobel Peace Prize, for example, which is often cited as evidence the process can identify significant contributions before they become widely famous.

The Nomination and Review Process

From Hundreds to a Handful

Yale’s committee reportedly works from a candidate pool numbering in the low hundreds at any given time, which gets narrowed considerably — down to a much smaller shortlist that receives closer scrutiny, including input from faculty and outside experts familiar with a candidate’s field.

The underlying standard stays consistent throughout that narrowing process: the committee is looking for genuinely distinctive, field-shaping contributions rather than general accomplishment.

The Role of Visibility and Recognition

Not every strong candidate starts out well known. The committee has, on occasion, recognized people working in public health, environmental protection, or poverty reduction in the developing world well before they had any broad name recognition in the U.S. — with a few later going on to win Nobel Prizes. Even so, most nominations that reach the committee involve people who already have some public profile, if only because visibility tends to correlate with a documented, verifiable record of achievement.

Timing Matters

Committees at both schools have shown awareness that timing shapes how an honor is perceived — recognizing people while their contributions are still fresh and relevant, rather than long after the fact, is generally treated as good practice.

Personal Touches

The process isn’t purely clinical. Committee members have occasionally used a selection to mark a personal or symbolic moment — for instance, honoring a public figure whose work resonated with a particular committee member or constituency in a given year.

Harvard’s Process

Harvard’s version of this process runs in parallel: a Corporation subcommittee reviews candidates and brings recommendations forward, with the full Corporation and then the Board of Overseers required to sign off. Harvard also accepts nominations from the wider university community, though the process is somewhat less structured than Yale’s formal annual solicitation.

Cornell’s Exception

Cornell stands apart from the rest of the Ivy League: it doesn’t award honorary degrees at all, as a matter of institutional policy. In its entire history, it has made exactly two exceptions, both in 1886 — to founding president Andrew Dickson White and to David Starr Jordan, who went on to become the first president of Stanford (after having earned a master’s degree at Cornell). Both were doctorates of law, awarded shortly after Cornell’s second president, Charles Kendall Adams, took office and briefly reversed White’s own no-honorary-degrees policy.

The policy has been revisited by Cornell’s faculty from time to time — including proposals in recent decades to introduce honorary degrees — but it has held. Cornell’s president, rather than an outside honoree, traditionally delivers the commencement address.

Cornell does recognize outstanding achievement through other channels, including various university-specific awards, but it maintains the distinction that an actual Cornell degree is earned, not conferred as an honor.

Ivy League Honorary Degrees – 2026

Across the Ivy League’s eight universities, spring 2026 commencements produced 43 honorary degrees in total. Here’s the breakdown by school:

(Dartmouth’s spring 2026 numbers are not broken out separately here; readers looking for a full eight-school count should check that university’s own commencement announcements directly.)

Trends in 2026

A few patterns stood out across this year’s honoree lists:

• Broader representation: a wider range of backgrounds among honorees than in some past years, including more women and people of color.
• International reach: several honorees were recognized for work with clear global stakes — climate, public health, human rights.
• Cross-disciplinary work: a number of honorees were cited for contributions that didn’t fit neatly into a single field.

None of this represents a formal policy shift so much as a continuation of trends that have been building across Ivy League honoree lists for several years.

Other Ivy League Institutions

Brown University

Brown awarded six honorary degrees in 2026. Its process runs through a joint committee of faculty and trustees, who bring recommendations to the full Board of Trustees for approval.

Columbia University

Columbia also awarded six honorary degrees in 2026, through a nominating committee that reports to its Board of Trustees. Columbia’s honorees that year spanned literature, science, and public policy.

Princeton University

Princeton awarded six honorary degrees in 2026, following review by a joint faculty-trustee committee with final sign-off from the Board of Trustees. Its 2026 honorees included figures from artificial intelligence, environmental science, and the humanities.

University of Pennsylvania

Penn awarded five honorary degrees in 2026, chosen through a committee that includes faculty, alumni, and trustees, with the Board of Trustees giving final approval. Its 2026 honorees worked in medicine, business, and social justice.

Controversies and Challenges

Honorary degree selections don’t always go smoothly. Because the choice inevitably reflects on the institution itself, Ivy League schools have periodically faced pushback — from students, faculty, or alumni — when a chosen honoree’s record or public statements were seen as inconsistent with the university’s values.

The General Pattern

These disputes tend to follow a similar arc: a selection draws criticism (sometimes before the ceremony, sometimes only after), the university reviews the concerns, and — in the cases that have become public — the institution has typically stood by its original decision rather than rescinding a degree already announced or conferred. Rescission does happen occasionally across American higher education generally, but it remains rare and is treated as a serious, unusual step rather than a routine response to controversy.

Institutional Responses

Partly in response to past controversies, several Ivy League institutions have tightened their vetting procedures over time — more thorough background review, more input from subject-matter experts, and in some cases clearer public explanation of why a particular honoree was chosen. Some universities have also formalized what a review or rescission process would look like, even if it’s rarely invoked.

• Enhanced vetting: more thorough background checks and expert consultation before a name is finalized
• Public communication: clearer public rationale for why a given honoree was selected
• Formal review procedures: defined (if rarely used) processes for reconsidering a degree if serious new information emerges

The Underlying Tension

At bottom, this reflects a real tension universities can’t fully engineer away: recognizing genuine excellence sometimes means honoring someone whose broader public record isn’t uncontroversial, and a school’s selection committee has to weigh that trade-off knowing the choice will be read, fairly or not, as an institutional endorsement.

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