Honorary Degrees.

The Amherst Student states this question of honorary degrees in the following forcible terms:

"The subject of college honorary degrees is just now attracting considerable attention, and during the next few weeks, while the annual harvest of D. D. 's, L. L. D. 's etc., is being gathered, it will probably become still more prominent. In this country these titles have degenerated into empty forms with far less meaning than the Prof. we see prefixed to the names of sleight of hand performers, roller-skaters, tight-rope walkers, etc. As President Gilman says, they have become the 'sham and shame' of American colleges. Every so-called university and college, no matter what its standing, the 'University of Cohosh' as well as Johns Hopkins or Harvard, has the power of conferring these degrees. To the outside world, that received from one is as good as the from the other, and so both are regarded as worthless. They are given in accordance with no general plan and for no special proficiency in any particular branch, but each year an army of Doctors of Divinity, Doctors of Law, etc., is turned loose upon an unsuspecting community that had, up to that time, lived in blissful iignorance of the latent talent wasting in its midst, and destined to be lost forever to the world, had not some keen-sighted, discriminating institution rescured it from oblivion. Two years ago our 'reform governor' was the involuntary means of lopping off one branch of the abuse at Harvard, but even this moderate reform was repudiated by a sister college. The fact that a man eats a commencement dinner or makes himself the patron of a college is hardly sufficient evidence of his ability to entitle him to a degree. So long as colleges continue to confer degrees, they ought to consider them of sufficient importance to preserve their dignity, but unless the present 'happy-go-lucky' system is done away with, and some general system agreed upon, this will be impossible."