Word: nickerson
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...give eight degrees a year, or sometimes more, but we always like to hold it below eleven or twelve," Nickerson says. "But that's a subjective figure; there are so many interesting people in the world. So every year we have a fat list of holdovers that we consider again...
...Nickerson vehemently denies that the committee chooses degree recipients in line with predetermined numbers of women, minority members or alumni. "We have no quotas," he says. "We would like a balance, but resist formula...
However, the committee does step down from the clouds sometimes to give special consideration to some Harvard people. Nickerson says the committee is "especially mindful of the great figures that have been associated with this university--presidents and deans and professors with enormous prestige are looked over carefully, though we try to resist giving degrees to people who are presently active...
Also, the committee loves to give a degree to someone whose "excellence" is not yet fully realized by the world at large. "We like to get people early on if they've shown sufficient promise," Nickerson says. "It's sad if every person we give a degree to is somebody who's gotten recognition before. Last year some of our most popular degree recipients had been recognized already--Georgia O'Keeffe and Margaret Mead, for example--but our faculty felt they hadn't received due recognition from the universities...
...many people turn down the honor. Nickerson says there is about a 95 per cent acceptance rate and that nobody in his memory has ever turned down a Harvard honorary degree for anything other than reasons of health or prior committment. And nobody but the Corporation, the Fellows, the Overseers, Bok, the committee and the degree recipients knows who will get the degrees until the morning of Commencement...