In short, back to our topic, it is surely less controversial for the university to confer honorary doctorate degrees, as so many did, but not an honorary professorship. I raise the issue here to show my support for the lecturers in protest.
Honestly, I even hope that this will attract the attention of HE our Minister of Education and Research. For example, how to write the honorary degree. Maybe related to this issue is how people write the academic degree that one is rewarded. Frankly, it is strange to observe at how we used to write academic degrees of someone in our society. Some people accumulate five academic degrees, and writing all of them behind or in front of the name of the person looks strange at least, or maybe even ridiculous. I guess only in Indonesia that people have a habit of doing this. For one, it becomes inefficient in terms of time to just read someone’s bio data, introducing him or her in an event. It is waste of time indeed.
I am afraid many would disagree with me by saying that they deserve them, since they work hard for acquiring each degree. I would readily agree that I can understand that. But still I think it would at least look better if for instance we just put one of them, say the most advanced degree received. If one has a doctorate degree, a Ph D, why would you care to put all the other degrees, up to your kindergarten. Again, I apologize to those disagree with me, but I just think that one’s name is more important than the degrees he or she acquired. In my long career of work in different occupations, I must keep reiterating my preference of not putting my academic degrees with my name. My name is already long, and I also acquired three master’s degrees and Sarjana Ekonomi prior to my PhD in Economics. One should not feel obligated to write my name with my degrees, but if you want to, one is enough. I better stop here before more people got angry at me for writing about this issue in my column. If you disagree, just take it as a joke. Ok?