The University of Amsterdam (UvA) recently announced that it will confer an honorary doctorate on Ratan Tata. The website text announces that the doctorate is being awarded “for the significant contribution he has made to the global expansion of the Tata Group, in which he has combined economic growth with a comprehensive corporate social responsibility programme.”* Ratan Tata is the billionaire head of a huge industrial empire. He has been described by the Economist as the ‘most powerful businessman in India and one of the most influential in the world’**. The Tata Group is a consortium of companies that are key players in every imaginable industrial sector in the country, from steel and gold to telecommunication, from software to tea, from hotel and tourism to pharmaceuticals, from the media to power outlets. They have founded cities and townships and practically own entire districts in the country. The essayist and activist Arundhati Roy recently quipped: “The Tata’s advertising tagline could easily be: You Can’t Live without Us.”*** The story often told is that Tata has generated employment and has a strong welfare policy for its employees. The story less often told is that it is heavily subsidized by the present neoliberal state, and that the ever-pervasive state-corporate nexus showers unlimited and vastly disproportionate privileges and entitlements upon a private body, which conveniently allow for a withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities. The story hardly told at all is that peasant land is appropriated for private interests with the approval and collusion of the state, which has led to rural uprisings and agitations, a capital-intensive and energy-guzzling production structure that is not sustainable, let alone ecologically viable, and has in fact led to a decline rather than rise in employment. Why is the UvA awarding a doctorate to the CEO of this mega-enterprise, particularly since he is already the recipient of at least seven other honorary doctorates (Pepperdine, Kharagpur, Cambridge, Asian Institute of Technology, Warwick, Ohio and most recently University of New South Wales)? Perhaps the doctoral committee refers to the educational ventures of the Tata Empire and his philanthropic initiatives: research and educational institutes such as the nuclear research centre Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Tata Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), prestigious fellowships, schools, hospitals. No doubt, these institutions bear reputation as fostering excellence, but the fact that they are ironically increasingly relying on public monies, despite a notional affiliation to their founder, calls into question how long this brand of corporate government will last. Further, one cannot help wondering whether the UvA implies that this could be a commendable solution to its own problems of decreasing public funding. The possibility of Tata Universities and Research Schools sprouting in Europe may not seem such a distant possibility any longer. The reasons behind this obviously strategic choice of an honorary academic award need to be made transparent and any underlying financial transactions, including funding of white papers and embedded research must be revealed to the public. The question that needs to be carefully addressed at a fundamental level pertains to why the global expansion of a corporate monopoly is worthy of an award, especially from a university? At a time when the prevalent paradigm of ‘growth’ itself is deeply in distress and rightly needs to be discarded, why is the UvA Faculty of Economics and Business instead uncritically celebrating the exponential growth of a company? What concept of globalisation does the Faculty of Economics and Business thereby subscribe to? The fact that corporate social responsibility is described in the UvA announcement merely as a phenomenon of genuine benevolence further indicates that Tata’s sophisticated Public Relations and news management machinery is doing its cosmetic wonders. If the practice of awarding honorary doctorates bears any relevance at all today, it should be used sensitively and wisely, to make a statement in support and recognition of individual efforts at knowledge production and dissemination outside the university. It is not specifically the person of Ratan Tata, but moreover the justification offered by the doctoral committee that must be strongly criticized and held accountable for. It damages the credibility of a university to pay homage to corporate giants by offering them a doctorate, especially at a moment when real doctoral research is factually being nullified. That being said, an award for Tata must unmistakably be interpreted as an award for the brand of global capitalism that his name stands for. That it is a symbolic gesture makes it all the more pertinent to pay close attention to what this award is an indication of. Such a gesture of academic politeness to mark Ratan Tata’s approaching retirement is tantamount to being an act of praising the Emperor’s (indeed the Empire’s) New Clothes.