When Bob Dylan sat in the Younger Hall at St Andrews’ University, looking crustier than the most barnacled professor, it was an historic moment. A university renowned for tradition and conservatism was paying tribute to one of the great iconoclasts and individualists of the 20th century by handing him an honorary music degree. For possibly the only time in half a millennium, the university’s black academic gown looked almost stylish, worn with penitential chic by the po-faced musician. Perhaps he had imbibed some of the spirit of John Knox that lingers in the place, even though he was helicoptered in and out of town in less than a couple of hours.

For the university, it was a publicity coup of the kind such institutions can only dream. For the rest of us, it was a reminder of how ridiculous giving away academic qualifications is. Dylan, an undoubted genius, requires no certificate, or praise, or adulation to prove it. St Andrews, however, does need headlines. And he certainly helped them reach every newspaper and news bulletin that day.

Eleven years on, St Andrews and its honorary degrees are again making headlines, but for less entertaining reasons. This week its senate will debate whether to rescind the degree they gave to Cardinal Keith O’Brien in the same week as Dylan. Following his public disgrace for sexual misconduct some consider it inappropriate for him to retain this distinction, which carries a seal of approval they do not believe O’Brien deserves.

It is not the only occasion when a university has been put in this awkward position. When Edinburgh annulled President Mugabe’s honorary LLD it was the first time an international figure had been thus humiliated; when the University of Bedfordshire revoked the doctorate given to Jimmy Saville it was probably the first to be removed posthumously. It is too early to know if St Andrews will strip the Cardinal of his honour, but if they do, then those of its students who urged that Fred Goodwin be similarly chastised following his lead role in the banking debacle will have reason to feel aggrieved. Indeed, they have good reason regardless, given the behaviour he displayed while bringing the banking industry into utter disrepute, and his subsequent lack of remorse. Why St Andrews University did not act to disassociate itself from him is puzzling.

Of course, the whole business of honorary degrees is a farce. It is an exchange based entirely on self-aggrandisement: in the case of the university, a means by which to associate itself with the famous and the talented, in the hope of reaping financial benefit or cultural prestige. For those who go on stage to accept their symbolic scrolls, meanwhile, it adds academic heft and respectability to their curriculum vitae, allowing them to put letters after their name, and framed certificates on their wall. Quite what good this does an actor such as Kim Cattrall from Sex in the City (John Moore’s University, Liverpool) or a celebrity gardener like Alan Titchmarsh (Bradford and Winchester), I do not claim to know. But then, I don’t have a degree in psychology, real or unearned. All I can say is that it is a display of naked sycophancy on both sides.

What the St Andrews dilemma also reveals, however, is that the vetting process by which recipients are selected is inadequate. As with the Queen’s honours, the number of high profile figures who have been garlanded with gongs, only later to fall into disrepute, is astonishing. Either a disproportionate number of those reaching the top of their professions are rogues, or universities and the Queen’s advisors are too blinded by the dazzle of big names to heed the warning signs or rumours.

Closer policing could obviously prevent such embarrassments as finding a Goodwin or Saville on one’s roll call of celebrity graduands. But better still would be ending the practice altogether. Not only is it an insult to all students who have to work for their degrees, but it undermines one of the most important principles of higher education. All first-class universities work on the understanding that the finest minds win the best degrees, regardless of background, privilege, connections or status. Anything that runs contrary to this unbreakable code is not only unedifying, but ought to become as much a relic of the past as the weird academic rituals and garb they insist upon in St Andrews.

Rumour has it that after being awarded his degree, Dylan broke his omerta to ask if he could keep the gown. When I graduated from St Andrews, I made sure my red flannel cape went with me, not because it held any nostalgic value, but because it was a useful dressing gown, so long as nobody else ever saw it.