Faculty passed a resolution to decrease the requirements needed for students to receive posthumous honorary degrees.

The new policy requires a student be “enrolled [at Dickinson College] and in good standing academically and socially,” said Neil Weissman, provost and dean of the college. 

Weissman also explained that all eligible students from 2006 on will receive posthumous honorary degrees automatically. 2006 is the cut-off year “because that’s when the faculty created the old policy, so that just seemed to be a reasonable date,” Weissman said.

Eligible students will receive a diploma but “the wording will be a little different,” according to Weissman.

The previous policy concerning posthumous honorary degrees required a student “have finished all the courses for the major, all the courses for the graduation requirement. You could only have four electives left,” said Weissman, “You really needed to be a senior and so there was a strong feeling that that was just not the right way to go.”  

Weissman brought the issue to the Academic Program and Standards Committee (APSC) after conferring with several “senior officers,” but “many others, including students, had raised the issue,” he said.

APSC’s recommendation then was presented to the faculty as a resolution at the December 2018 faculty meeting. Weissman said the resolution passed “without any real debate.”

“We [the administration] will acknowledge everyone under the policy at [this year’s] commencement,” said Weissman. “The current plan is to, I think, have a notation in the program for those [students].” Weissman said that students affected by this policy in the future will be included in their class list at graduation, with a note.

Weissman said Dickinson has had “some really tragic cases in the last few years. This is a policy that you hope you will never need to look at or use, but those cases prompted us to consider how we wanted to approach this.”

A petition was circulated in the spring of 2018 to grant Legacy Watkins ’18, a student who died while studying abroad her junior year, an honorary diploma, according to a Dickinsonian article published on April 19, 2018. The old policy concerning posthumous honorary diplomas did not allow for Watkins to receive a diploma that year.

Weissman explained that in regards to the petition’s impact on the decision to change the policy, “it wasn’t that we ignored the petition, but that wasn’t what prompted it [the change in policy] in particular.”

“There was just a strong feeling that once a student is here and, in [the case of a posthumous honorary diploma], unable to finish a degree for reasons beyond their control, that as an assertion of the principal that we’re a community that we just wanted to do it [change the policy].”