Universities ‘must keep track of’ visiting professorships

Universities that hand out honorary and visiting professorships must get better at keeping track of them if they are to avoid potential reputational risks, it has been warned.

The topic has been in the spotlight after The Sunday Times reported that Michael Dixon, head of the UK’s royal medical household, claimed on his website to be a visiting professor at UCL and to hold honorary positions at the medical schools of the universities of Exeter and Birmingham.

Asked by the paper to confirm the claims, each university was forced to delve into their institutional archives and – while all said that Dr Dixon, an advocate of homeopathy, did not hold an official position – they struggled to ascertain whether he had ever been handed a title.

A spokesperson for Exeter told Times Higher Education that the role Dr Dixon may have held was in the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry, a partnership between the universities of Exeter and Plymouth, which was disbanded in 2017, and Exeter no longer has these records.

They said Exeter does keep track of its other honorary titles and holds information for seven years after the person leaves the role. An honorary title was time-limited, the spokesperson said, depending on the “nature and duration of the individual’s association with the university”, with most initially lasting three years.

Dr Dixon’s potential link to UCL is also understood to be more than a decade old. “All honorary and visiting appointments are time-limited,” a spokesperson said. “Staff who would have been involved in this appointment have now left UCL, so we have no further information.”

The episode showed the need for a more formalised system for handing out honorary positions, according to David Palfreyman, director of the Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies.

All titles at New College, University of Oxford, where Mr Palfreyman is bursar, are conferred via a vote of its governing body, he said. “I would expect that any well-governed university would operate on a similar basis – the award of title or status having to be made as a formal decision by senate or council based on agreed criteria,” he said.

Even where such rules do exist, Mr Palfreyman said, they can often be forgotten at departmental level and rarely does anyone still trading off old links to institutions get called out for doing so.

“All this is boring bureaucratic stuff but can suddenly become a significant PR issue”, he said.

Dr Dixon did not respond to a request for comment from THE but acknowledged to The Sunday Times that his UCL professorship may have “lapsed”.

Malcolm Gillies, former vice-chancellor of City, University of London and London Metropolitan University and a long-time critic of honorary degrees, awards and titles, said problems often now arose because information on honours was increasingly held at faculty or school level, many of which may have since been abolished.

The casualisation of the workforce in higher education had led to many universities relying more heavily on those in temporary or honorary roles to carry out work for the institution, he said, adding to the importance of universities keeping a proper record of what positions are handed out and what that role actually entails.

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com