Honorary Degree

NEW YORK -- As the season for college commencements winds down, it's a good time to look at the practice of conferring honorary degrees.Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University, says honorary degrees "are used to reward donors who have given money. Sometimes they are used to draw celebrities to make the graduation special."He also notes the use of honorary degrees as the "last lesson a college can teach, by showing examples of people who most represent the values the institution stands for."

William Curry Moloney, 91, who studied and treated blood diseases before hematology became a medical specialty, died Nov. 3 in Boston at Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he had once been a director of hematology. He was one of the first to use chemotherapy to treat leukemia and lymphoma.John F. "Silky" Sullivan, 64, who helped found the veterans' rights group Swords to Plowshares, died yesterday in San Francisco.Mr. Sullivan joined the Navy in 1950 and served on an aircraft carrier. He was disabled in a car accident in San Diego while on active duty.

Monsignor Robert R. Kline, president emeritus of Mount St. Mary's College in Emmitsburg, calculates that over the course of his career he taught more students -- 13,000 -- than anyone else in the school's 189-year history.It is one of those claims that might be hard to check but impossible not to believe. Kline spent 46 years teaching at the school, leading generations of students through courses in philosophy, psychology and sociology. In addition, he was president from 1961 to 1967.Yesterday Mount St. Mary's awarded him an honorary degree in recognition of his long service.

A listing of commencement exercises held yesterday incorrectly identified Samuel H. Lacy as the speaker at Loyola College. In fact, the longtime Baltimore Afro-American sports editor received an honorary degree. The commencement speaker was Tim Russert, the Washington bureau chief of NBC News and host of "Meet the Press."The Sun regrets the errors.Pub Date: 5/18/97

DON'T EVEN THINK about dining at a fine restaurant tonight.By the coincidence of scheduling, about 9,000 degrees and certificates will be awarded today by Baltimore colleges and universities. By Education Beat's calculations, this is a record for a single day in the groves of Baltimore academia.Three of the public university giants, Towson State, the University of Maryland Baltimore County and the University of Baltimore, have graduations today, joining Peabody, Baltimore Hebrew University and that 500-pound gorilla, the Johns Hopkins University.

Hillary Rodham Clinton isn't saying where she'll store the gold leaf lettering, heavy cream-colored stock and florid citation of the honorary degree she receives Thursday from the University of Maryland College Park. Maybe it will reside with the eight others she has been awarded since her husband took office. Perhaps it will land crumpled in the wastebasket. It might even find its way into the now-famous "book room" of the White House, where other important documents have been known to turn up.Whatever becomes of it, the degree's future is not as mysterious as its actual worth.

About 6,600 students received degrees from Goucher College, the University of Maryland College Park and the University of Maryland at Baltimore during commencement ceremonies yesterday.William C. Richardson, the president of the Johns Hopkins University, who will step down next month, received honorary degrees from Goucher and UMAB.The University of Maryland College Park conferred degrees on approximately 4,700 students yesterday morning at the Cole Field House.They were addressed by syndicated columnist Carl T. Rowan.

When the queen of Thailand passes by, her royal subjects drop to their knees out of reverence for Her Majesty.They did it on Holliday Street yesterday afternoon when Queen Sirikit and her entourage visited Baltimore's City Hall, where the sight of common folk falling at the feet of high-ranking officials is somewhat rare.So revered is the royal family as spiritual and moral leader of the Thai people, that the woman who painted the "Welcome to Baltimore" greeting posters in the country's native language was awed just to know her queen would glimpse them.

OXFORD, England -- President Clinton, bare-headed, ruddy-faced and smiling above a scarlet robe, received an honorary doctorate yesterday from Oxford University to cap his weeklong tour of Europe."

W. Lloyd Fisher, a retired partner in a Baltimore brokerage firm who raised money for several charities and institutions, died Aug. 2 of a stroke at Roland Park Place.Mr. Fisher, who was 91, had lived at Roland Park Place since 1984, the year he retired as a limited partner from Baker Watts & Co. He had begun his career there in 1932 as a securities salesman, and was named a partner in 1942.Born and reared in Baltimore's Pigtown community, the son of a bricklayer, he graduated in 1921 from City College.

The nickname for athletic teams at Iowa State University is "the Cyclones." The nickname for athletic teams at the University of Iowa is "the Hawkeyes." So I made a mistake in a recent column about former U.S. Naval Academy wrestlers Lloyd Keaser and Wayne Hicks. The column said "an assistant Iowa State coach asked Hicks to work out with some 112-pound high school kid the Hawkeyes were thinking of recruiting." It should have said an assistant Iowa State coach asked Hicks to work out with some 112-pound high school kid the Cyclones were thinking of recruiting.

Villa Julie College officials have long considered commencement to be a family affair. That is why the small liberal arts college in Stevenson has consistently held two ceremonies on Graduation Day, allowing each student to bring more family and friends than the two guests they otherwise would be allowed. But this year, the distinction took on extra significance: Yesterday's 369 graduates included 14 students who are children or grandchildren of faculty or staff members. In most cases, officials arranged to have the students' relatives award their diplomas.

As a debate swirls in the Catholic Church over how to treat Catholic politicians who back abortion rights, Mount St. Mary's College has withdrawn an offer of an honorary degree to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales after a campus protest over his support for the death penalty. The reversal came after some students and faculty asked that Gonzales, a potential Supreme Court candidate, not speak at the Catholic college's commencement May 23 because of his record on the death penalty, said Mount St. Mary's President Thomas H. Powell.

QUOTE OF THE DAY "Maybe we should say, `Hola amiga!' to customers now." Anthony Ramage, cashier at the McDonald's where the faltering English of another worker annoyed state Comptroller William Donald Schaefer. (Article, Page 1B) NATIONAL Voters haven't abandoned Bush President Bush's Iraq policy has endured one setback after another. Yet while a growing number of voters are holding the president accountable for what they view as failures in Iraq, they seem far from ready to abandon him in his bid for re-election.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - In a leafy courtyard at Yale University, the time came yesterday for President Bush to stop being funny. There had been talk enough of his mediocre grades, enough about how he snoozed instead of studied in the college library, enough of the comic self-deprecation. The president now had a serious message to deliver. "Today, I visit not only my alma mater, but the city of my birth," said Bush, who was born in this city while his father was a Yale undergraduate and became a student here himself.

Faculty at Towson University might be forgiven a double take when they see Richard P. Chait receive an honorary degree from their institution tomorrow afternoon. After all, some among them might be tempted to put a noose over Chait's head instead of the colorful hood that represents the honor. That's because Chait is seen as a critic of the tenure system, the virtual lifetime job guarantee that some say ensures academic freedom, but that others say only allows early retirement at full pay. "There will be many faculty members who will be nonplused at this guy getting an honorary degree, that it's like inviting the wolf to the chicken coop," says Jack Fruchtman, a Towson political science professor who chairs the school senate.

NEW YORK -- As the season for college commencements winds down, it's a good time to look at the practice of conferring honorary degrees.Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University, says honorary degrees "are used to reward donors who have given money. Sometimes they are used to draw celebrities to make the graduation special."He also notes the use of honorary degrees as the "last lesson a college can teach, by showing examples of people who most represent the values the institution stands for."

William Curry Moloney, 91, who studied and treated blood diseases before hematology became a medical specialty, died Nov. 3 in Boston at Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he had once been a director of hematology. He was one of the first to use chemotherapy to treat leukemia and lymphoma.John F. "Silky" Sullivan, 64, who helped found the veterans' rights group Swords to Plowshares, died yesterday in San Francisco.Mr. Sullivan joined the Navy in 1950 and served on an aircraft carrier. He was disabled in a car accident in San Diego while on active duty.

Monsignor Robert R. Kline, president emeritus of Mount St. Mary's College in Emmitsburg, calculates that over the course of his career he taught more students -- 13,000 -- than anyone else in the school's 189-year history.It is one of those claims that might be hard to check but impossible not to believe. Kline spent 46 years teaching at the school, leading generations of students through courses in philosophy, psychology and sociology. In addition, he was president from 1961 to 1967.Yesterday Mount St. Mary's awarded him an honorary degree in recognition of his long service.

A listing of commencement exercises held yesterday incorrectly identified Samuel H. Lacy as the speaker at Loyola College. In fact, the longtime Baltimore Afro-American sports editor received an honorary degree. The commencement speaker was Tim Russert, the Washington bureau chief of NBC News and host of "Meet the Press."The Sun regrets the errors.Pub Date: 5/18/97