The Ultimate Accolade

After years, sometimes many years, of hard graft, studying, pain and penury, the final achievement of a degree or other award feels like a major milestone. The ceremony to mark the award is always a grand one, full of pomp and flummery and silly hats to reinforce the achievement in front of friends, family and supporters. It’s all a really big deal.

But what of the certificate, the degree parchment handed over by the presiding officer or another official on or near the stage or, sometimes, sent through the post later?  Many years ago, when there were far fewer graduates, they used to be hand-written on lovely pieces of parchment or goatskin or something like that. Sometimes they were written in Latin too. In a mass system though and one where fake degree certificates are rampant, there is much more effort given now to ensuring the authenticity of degree certificates is assured including through the use of embossed holograms of the university crest (although if you are absolutely determined to make a fake certificate you can buy these as stickers). Pretty much everything is in English though these days. You still usually have a nice university crest on it though to ensure it looks all proper and official.

Sign on the Dotted Line

But there is another element to degree certificates which, perhaps surprisingly, does vary quite a lot from institution to institution: the signatures.It’s not only the signatures though, the actual text on the certificate varies too as it needs to state the awarding body within the institution which has formally signed off the award of a qualification. It might be the Senate or Academic Board or it might be the Council or Board of Governors. So the body confirming the award should dictate the individuals who provide the signatures of confirmation of the award you would think. It’s a bit more messy than that though. The most common signatories across most certificates are the Vice-Chancellor and the University Registrar or Secretary but there are some variations. Quite a few in fact.

I’ve just picked a sample of older and a fewer newer institutions to give a flavour of this.

Group 1 – Standard Issue

• University of Leeds – Vice-Chancellor and Registrar and Secretary
• Edge Hill University – Vice-Chancellor and PVC/University Secretary
• University of Birmingham – Vice-Chancellor and Registrar
• University of Bristol- Vice-Chancellor and Registrar
• St Mary’s University – Vice-Chancellor and Registrar
• Durham University – Chancellor (but is actually the Vice-Chancellor) and University Secretary. Earlier versions do have the Chancellor’s signature.

Group 2 – A Slight Variation

• Imperial College – President and Academic Registrar
• Harper Adam’s University – Vice-Chancellor and Academic Registrar
• Northumbria University – Vice-Chancellor and Academic Registrar

Group 3 – Going Solo

• Cardiff University – Vice-Chancellor only
• University for the Creative Arts – Vice-Chancellor only (and a really distinctive certificate)
• University of Cumbria – Vice-Chancellor only
• St Andrews University – Vice-Chancellor only
• Oxford Brookes University – Vice-Chancellor only
• University of Liverpool – Vice-Chancellor only
• London School of Economics – Vice-Chancellor only (but of the University of London)

Group 4 – Various Combos

• University of Cambridge – Administrative Officer and Registrary
• Oxford University – Registrar
• University of Edinburgh – Principal, Head of College and University Secretary
• University of Glasgow – Principal, Clerk to Senate and Head of College
• Falmouth University – Chair of Board of Governors, Vice-Chancellor and Chancellor (currently it is Dawn French)
• King’s College London – Chair of Council and Principal

So there is quite a bit of variety across the sector and no hard and fast rules about degree certificate signatories. One other key point to mention is that these days almost all of the signatures you will see on degree certificates are pre-printed rather than real. This makes sense when you realise that in my former role as Registrar at the University of Nottingham my signature appeared on around 150,000 certificates. Had it been real then I would have spent years signing all those. Mind you if I’d given any thought to this at the outset I really would have done a better signature, one that was at least partly legible.

Need a PhD from Harvard? No Problem

Any searches for degree certificates throws up a large number of services offering to provide you with a fake certificate from a university of your choice for whichever qualification you desire. There must be a market for this kind of thing but I am not sure how easy it is to deploy a fake certificate for material benefit.

The other service you will find advertised heavily is certificate framing. These companies are careful not to use university officer signatures on their sample certificates (instead they seem to have persuaded Neil Armstrong to sign as VC and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Registrar) but as you can see from this example the made up name they use is a clever Latin pun. So very HE.

What do you remember about the signatures on your degree certificates? Or perhaps you have been a signatory? Do tell.