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.
