Dr. Obama

Barack Obama, President of the United States, Commander in Chief of the American Armed Forces, Leader of the Free World, and God Figure to the Nation's First Dog "Bo," will deliver a commencement address next month to graduates at Arizona State University in Tempe. However, the school will not award him an honorary degree.

The school has announced that, because Obama has been newly elected, he has not yet produced a "body of work" sufficient to justify receipt of an honorary degree. Unlike the illustrious recipients of past ASU honorary degrees, q.v..

For now, at least until the president has accomplished something worth talking about, he will have to be satisfied with his undergraduate degree from Columbia and his law degree from Harvard. The hoped-for glories of recognition from the scholars of Tempe still shimmer in his future.

It's just as well. Honorary degrees are a bizarre American phenomenon. They are often given, seemingly, as a quid pro quo for a speaker's agreement to speak at commencement. The nation is full of characters of somewhat dubious accomplishment who go through life calling themselves "Dr. John Doe," merely because they long ago accepted an invitation to speak before some undistinguished college.

There are better ways to honor a speaker than awarding him or her a faux-degree. ASU may have blundered into such a solution when it finally announced -- after much embarrassing publicity -- that, in lieu of awarding Obama an honorary degree, the school would rename one of its major scholarship programs in his honor. That recognition is more meaningful, less potentially deceptive, and may, as an added benefit to the university itself, encourage additional alumni contributions to the fund.

President Obama's prestige, as he represents America to the world, probably won't be substantially impaired by the Sun Devils' failure to give him some additional initials to tack on to the end of his name.