It’s a sad reality that university recognition of members of the community - and especially the grand-daddy of them all, the honourary degree - have just as much to do with how generous someone is to the university than how generous someone is to society. Though there are no rules - give a certain amount and you’ll get a certain honour - and the amount of money involved would make buying such things outright prohibitively expensive to all but the most ego-maniacal of  it’s almost expected that a university’s most prestigious donors will be thanked publicly in some way. A seat on its board, a building or program named after them, an honourary degree, or a combination of these.

I explored this issue in an article I wrote for a journalism class in 2005 and had published in The Link, Concordia’s student newspaper. I’ve included it below.

I bring this all up because Concordia has just released the names of its honourary degree recipients for this year, and a familiar name is on it: Frederick H. Lowy. Lowy served as Rector/President of Concordia University from 1995 to 2005, a time when doing so was hardly an easy job.

The community’s respect for Lowy only grew after his departure, when his replacement turned out to be a disaster. People started wishing or the good old days, when the warring factions - students vs. administrators, part-time faculty vs. full-time faculty, Senate vs. Board, were kept at a warm simmer by Lowy’s diplomacy.

In other words, they could have done worse.

And fortunately, there are no obvious conflicts with the other three honourees, one in the business management area (former CP CEO Robert Richie), one in the education field (former École Polytechnique head Robert Louis Papineau), and one in the arts (professor Laura Mulvey). That might be enough to help us forget the fact that three of these four are here for their skills managing a large organization and not, say, fighting malaria in Sudan.

Read More »