Talk:List of honorary doctors of Victoria University of Wellington

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Pat Ralph[edit]

@Stuartyeates: I wonder whether Pat Ralph has fallen through the cracks with the University of New Zealand on its way out and the other universities becoming independent at the end of 1961, but the University of New Zealand still awarding some of the degrees in 1962 and their roll closing in 1963 (if I understand it right). She was awarded a DSc in 1962, and that is always an honorary degree, isn't it? She's not on the list of Honorary Doctors of the University of New Zealand, although in their printed roll, she appears on page 286 and her DSc is already listed. The first entry on the list of Honorary Doctors of Victoria University of Wellington is from 1963. Is there perhaps confusion as to which university awarded the DSc to her? Do you have contacts at Victoria who could find out what was going on in this case? Schwede 66 20:33, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

No, the DSc (and other higher doctorates) are NOT always honorary degrees. When not awarded honoris causa, the higher degrees are on the basis of a substantial body of published work in a given field, showing excellence, leadership and original and prestigious research in that field. See for example the Victoria Higher Doctorates Statute. Generally candidates submit a collection of published papers. Hence the Victoria library catalogue lists a thesis comprised of published papers that Ralph submitted for her DSc. Paora (talk) 21:10, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I would content that there is a place for parallel lists of non-honourary doctors. See for example the collection of theses at Victoria. Note that most theses collections have substantial holes in them, especially in the early years. Stuartyeates (talk) 23:03, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Schwede66: / @Paora: / I should declare a conflict of interest here, given that I work in the VUW library and Gregor W. Yeates had a non-honoris causa DSc from University of Canterbury. Stuartyeates (talk) 23:20, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the clarification regarding honorary degrees. I've had a look through the first page of the collection of theses at Victoria (Te Waharoa), and eight of those entries refer to a DSc. Of those, one of them has an article on Wikipedia. That feels on the low side for it to be worthwhile having a list on Wikipedia. Ok, that might just be a statistical fluke to do with the rather low sample size, but I suggest that at least say half of them should be notable for such a list to be worthwhile. I assume that a higher doctorate does not result in automatic notability. Schwede 66 01:26, 15 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Schwede66: / @Paora: My intuition would be that those with higher doctorates are likely to be notable, but I'm not going to set out to prove that with an institution I have a COI with. Also I've been slaving to get academics more balanced for gender and race (see Wikipedia:WikiProject New Zealand/Requested articles/New Zealand academic biographies), and adding a bunch of (largely) old dead white guys isn't going to help that. Stuartyeates (talk) 23:57, 16 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]