Updates on the award of honorary degrees to worthy recipients and perhaps occasionally questionable individuals have been reported here regularly over the years. See for example this latest post on some notable awards. There is also, bizarre as it may seem, an apparently lucrative market in fake honorary doctorates.

These are very much awards for individuals and, while universities always hope that they will get some payback from those they honour, be that in terms of support, profile, a sprinkling of stardust and even possibly some money, there is often not a lot in the way of subsequent payback or engagement.

But that might be about to change. One such honorary grad has decided to set up a society for honorary degree holders. The idea is to bring that disparate range of honorary doctors together to get them to connect with each other and somehow do things:

Each year, Universities award honorary doctorates to exceptional people across every field of society. Collectively they represent an extraordinary source of insight, influence and opportunity, and one that is largely untapped.

The Society exists to connect it and release it. We give Honorary Doctors a purposeful platform to stay connected, support their awarding institution and connect to a completely unique international network. We give Universities a simple way to engage with the community they have already gathered, whilst tapping into a ‘hive mind’ of international intelligence.

Not only is the new society bringing all these worthies and celebs together to create a hive mind, it aims to help universities marshal their honorary degree resources better by supporting the establishment of institutional chapters:

You have already chosen them. A chapter is how you engage them to achieve greater things.

Your Honorary Doctors were selected with care, and they were honoured because their achievement reflects what your institution stands for. Many would support more if there were an easy and purposeful way to engage.

Without a clear channel to contribute through, engagement can naturally fade over time, and a great deal of goodwill goes quietly unused. We have found this is common in many Universities across the world. It is a question of structure, and structure is solvable.

A local chapter of the Society supplies that structure: a board drawn from your own Honorary Doctors, regular engagement and direction setting with your leadership, and a digital platform where challenges are raised, worked and closed with the outcome recorded. Behind it sits a global Society of Honorary Doctors, so when a challenge needs to reach beyond your own Honorary Doctors, it reaches Fellows across the whole Society to support and solve.

It’s a bold prospectus. It remains to be seen how many members of that ever-expanding group of honorary PhD graduates decide to take up the offer. Some have signed up already (mainly from Scottish universities) and I suspect there will be more joining as the organisation tries to take off.

One additional handy service the website offers is a collection of recent honorary degree recipients. Assuming they keep this up then it will save some of us some work – a valuable public service to go with all of the other benefits.

All of this certainly treats honorary graduates and their awards with a seriousness (verging on reverence you might say) that is quite unusual these days. Will it catch on? A lot will depend on universities deciding they want to come on board and promoting it to their honorary graduates. We’ll have to wait and see.