Education: Honorary Spoof

“By virtue of powers which we have invented,” the baroque lettering proclaimed, the trustees of San Francisco’s Millard Fillmore Institute were delighted to confer on any applicant a variety of “honorary and meretricious” titles ranging from “Doctor of Generosity” to “Doctor of Pinochle Sciences.” All he needed was $10. A Latin motto made the point clear: Ad populum phaleras, ego te intus et in cute novi’ (Loose translation: “You may think you’re hot stuff, but we know you, buster.”)

Spoofing honorary degrees is the four-year-old avocation of John Bear, 33, a freelance writer, erstwhile adman, and co-inventor of the once popular Beethoven sweatshirt. Having sweated out a real doctorate in communications at Michigan State University, he found himself feeling less than charitable each June as he read about such instant academics as Dr. Captain Kangaroo, Dr.Bob Hope and the late Dr. Dario Toffenetti, a Manhattan restaurateur honored by the University of Idaho for “promoting . . . the Idaho potato.”

The Millard Fillmore Institute is Bear’s most sincere tribute: he discovered in an encyclopedia that the nation’s 13th President had turned down an honorary degree from Oxford on the grounds that he did not deserve it. Bear’s aim: to promote a resurgence of Fillmore’s rectitude.

The outrageous tone of Bear’s sham-skins makes it clear that the Institute is not one of the bogus diploma mills that peddle apparently legitimate degrees. Still, the Office of the Attorney General of California has now advised Bear that it is concerned over the possibility that some day, someone may use a Fillmore doctorate fraudulently. Rather than fight in court, Bear has returned $400 worth of orders. He plans to sell his idea to an English company and already has a prospective diploma, suitable for framing, with the legend: