who has been awarded the most honorary degrees
Rev. Theodore Hesburgh
title: Honorary degree text: education in question and not within the broader community. Rev. Theodore Hesburgh held the record for most honorary degrees, having been awarded 150 during his lifetime. The practice dates back to the Middle Ages, when for various reasons a university might be persuaded, or otherwise see fit, to grant exemption from some or all of the usual statutory requirements for the awarding of a degree. The earliest honorary degree on record was awarded to Lionel Woodville in the late 1470s by the University of Oxford. He later became Bishop of Salisbury. In the latter part of the 16th century, the title: Honorary degree text: the first US university to explicitly have a policy of not awarding honorary degrees at the behest of its founder, Thomas Jefferson. In 1845, William Barton Rogers, then chairman of the faculty, vigorously defended this policy; in 1861, he founded MIT in Boston and continued this practice. The University of Virginia does annually award Thomas Jefferson Medals in Architecture and in Law, as the highest honors accorded by that institution. MIT has on rare occasions awarded honorary professorships; Winston Churchill was so honored in 1949, as was Salman Rushdie in 1993. Similarly, the Stanford Alumni Association occasionally awards the "Degree title: American Academy of Arts and Sciences text: scientists and scholars, but also writers and artists as well as representatives from the full range of professions and public life. Throughout the Academy's history, 10,000 fellows have been elected, including such notables as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John James Audubon, Joseph Henry, Washington Irving, Josiah Willard Gibbs, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, Edward R. Murrow, Jonas Salk, Eudora Welty, and Duke Ellington. Foreign honorary members have included Jose Antonio Pantoja Hernandez, Leonhard Euler, Marquis de Lafayette, Alexander von Humboldt, Leopold von Ranke, Charles Darwin, Otto Hahn, Jawaharlal Nehru, Pablo Picasso, Liu Kuo-Sung (Liu Guosong), title: Honorary citizenship of the United States text: Honorary citizenship of the United States A person of exceptional merit, generally a non-United States citizen, may be declared an honorary citizen of the United States by an Act of Congress or by a proclamation issued by the President of the United States, pursuant to authorization granted by Congress. Eight people have been so honored, six posthumously, and two, Sir Winston Churchill and Mother Teresa, during their lifetimes. For Lafayette and Mother Teresa, the honor was proclaimed directly by an Act of Congress. In the other cases, an Act of Congress was passed authorizing the President to grant honorary citizenship title: Honorary citizenship text: Honorary citizenship Honorary citizenship is a status bestowed by a country on a foreign or native individual whom it considers to be especially admirable or otherwise worthy of the distinction. By act of United States Congress and presidential assent, an individual may be named an honorary citizen of the United States. Since 1963, it has been awarded to only eight individuals. Honorary Canadian citizenship requires unanimous approval in both houses of Parliament. The only people to ever receive honorary Canadian citizenship are Raoul Wallenberg posthumously in 1985; Nelson Mandela in 2001; the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso in 2006; Aung