Our cheap obsession with titles

This week had a flurry of announcements on Twitter by Ugandans who had supposedly been conferred upon the revered and priceless title of ‘doctor’ by way of an honorary PhD award. The problem though is that it is alleged that this conferment comes with a price tag! One pays money to be ‘honoured’. The honorary PhD is paid for.

On Twitter, former Aruu country Member of Parliament, Samuel Odonga Otto, a maverick who was incomparably controversial during his time as a legislator in Uganda’s Parliament, promptly edited his Twitter profile to read ‘Hon Dr Odonga Otto’.

There is something patently wrong here. For one, one institution that ostensibly dolls out honorary PhDs to Ugandans goes by the rather curious if suspicious name of Zoe Life Theological College, USA.

A quick Google search reveals that this is a very suspect institution. It does not have a web domain name that ends in .edu, which is standard for American colleges and universities. Also, strictly speaking, in the American higher education system, research universities and not colleges award PhDs, so purporting to award honorary PhDs is irregular.

An honorary PhD is typically awarded to individuals with distinguished careers and a track record of outstanding service to humanity. But universities also use this award to attract and ingratiate themselves with the powerful and famous, often for purposes of benefitting materially though this does not mean that the person getting the award directly pays the institution.

Whatever the case, awarding an honorary PhD must come from a recognition that someone has a unique and extraordinary profile to justify the award.

Among the recent awardees from the said American ‘college’ include a current MP with a very thin CV and a former MP in Mr Otto who does not carry a CV compelling enough to merit an honorary PhD award.

On Twitter this week, there were pictures of the king of Busoga too getting the hallowed PhD, but so was a one Mr Balaam Barugahare! Now, anyone who knows a thing or two about the latter would see that the honorary award is a big joke and sheer mockery of the title Dr

To be sure, the honorary PhD bug is not unique to Uganda, not even to Africa. Around the world there is a long history of controversy and contestations over the criteria and standards for awarding what is the highest academic qualification bestowed by a university and with it a permanent formal title.

Some years back in Ghana, it became fashionable for politicians, celebrity-pastors and other desperados seeking ways to impress upon the public to get awarded honorary PhDs from shady American institutions. Then Ghana’s higher education authority was compelled to step in and declare that an honorary PhD does not bestow on someone the official title of Dr. It is egregious when direct monetary exchanges take place. If one pays for an honorary PhD, the honouring bit is stripped away because one has paid. To pay to be honoured is utterly ludicrous. Someone with money has the option of paying tuition and fees in a university and enrol into a PhD programme, study and earn the degree and the title.

Problem though is that this requires time, sacrifice and brains. It is tiring and torturous. Dear reader, your columnist spent six long years (and one previous year as a pre-PhD student, total of seven) in the trenches to get to the finish line. On the grand finale-day, I had to put up a spirited fight in defence of a 400 plus page dissertation (book).

Most genuine PhD holders go through a rigorous and demanding experience, thus it is an insult that someone can pay a few thousand dollars to be crowned Dr so and so, then thrown it in people’s faces.

But there is a bigger problem here, it is social and cultural, a tradition of obsessing with and clamouring for titles and empty grandeur. We do not look at situations and actors with an eye on the substance of what they offer and mean, rather as a society we are often enamoured by the form and surface of what we see.

Thus, savvy individuals will try and wear high sounding titles like honourable or doctor or professor or your excellency because that is what society will be fascinated with, not what we are actually able to do or what we have demonstrated we are capable of doing. You see this even among peers in universities. There is more concern with how to get someone’s official title/rank right than the substantive issues at stake.

It well be that the current crazy of thirsting for and chasing after titles will fully water-down formal titles compelling us to move away from focussing on one’s title to paying attention to their actual work, what they have accomplished, the quality of their content not so much the form of their title.

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