They have all received honorary degrees from British universities in the past month. What do Joanna Lumley, Claire Rayner, Prue Leith and Richard Rogers have in common? They've all had one this autumn. And Cilla Black, Jackie Mason, Cherie Booth, Sean Connery and Seve Ballesteros? Yup, that's right. Honorary British graduates, all of them.

Most poor saps have to be enrolled for three or four years to get their BA or BSc Hons. Some actually put in a bit of study. A few stay on to be postgraduates, conducting research that attempts and even occasionally achieves an original contribution to human knowledge. But all that's a rather ploddingly academic way to go about getting a degree. Celebrity offers a quicker route - the fast track to an honorary hons or no-sweat PhD.

These days, honorary degrees are like the Emmy awards, and intellectual content is often beside the point. There may be some universities that secretly regard hon degs as a racket. There may be some that have subverted or pastiched them - by giving Ronnie Kray a degree in law and criminology, say, or Lord Falconer one in tourism and economics. And Oxford University did refuse to take Margaret Thatcher to its bosom. But as far as the principle is concerned, I'm not aware of any significant breaking of ranks.

Even in Scotland, where educational standards are traditionally more severe, the number of actors, restaurateurs and sportsmen being honoured is on the increase. Sportsmen, above all. Gary Player has a degree from Dundee. Gavin Hastings has one from Paisley. Add to those the hons handed out to golfer Colin Montgomery (St Andrews), snooker ace Stephen Hendry (Stirling), former racing driver Jackie Stewart (Heriot-Watt), and world squash champion Peter Nicol (Robert Gordon University), and it begins to look as if it's physical rather than mental accomplishment that the Scots esteem.

Enrobing Monty last July, the vice-chancellor of St Andrews, Colin Vincent, explained that he was "a role model and a fine ambassador for Scotland" who has brought "golfing fame and respectability to Europe". Role model, you see. It wouldn't be enough to say that Montgomery is a bloody good golfer. And it would be a lie to say that his MA thesis "Green Thoughts in a Green Eyeshade: the Golfing Hermeneutics of Andrew Marvell" is a seminal work, or even exists. But call Monty - or Prue Leith or Sean Connery - a role model and you sidestep the problem that their golf or cooking or playing of James Bond have nothing to do with intellectual attainment.

The rise of the honorary degree, accusers say, is symptomatic of a more general dumbing-down in the universities. And certainly it's not much of a message to put out to students that, if you spend your life running a business or playing sport rather than studying, a degree might drop in your lap. But the deeper significance, now that universities have to attract funds, publicity and student numbers in order to survive, is their desperation to prove how in touch they are with the "real world", meaning fame and showbiz. Gown and town used to be opposites. Now Mr and Ms Celebrity Out on the Town are presented with a gown and mortarboard, in recognition of their model citizenship.

It's a mutually agreeable arrangement. The profs get to show how cool they are, how far from cloisters or ivory-towers - "See, we know who the Spice Girls are, we even give them degrees." And the recipients feel flattered and touched, all the more so since the degree comes with no strings attached. They're not being asked to give an annual lecture, donate money or do a performance of whatever it is they do. So why should they have qualms about accepting? It's an honour, right? And well-deserved: that little chorus in the last hit single, that aubergine starter, the move that led to the equaliser - come to think of it, they were kind of intellectual.

Do I sound piqued? Maybe I am, having been a student till I was 28. My degrees are all water under the bridge now, of little use except in going to places like China (where educational attainments seem to matter when applying for a visa) or for making bookings as a doctor in stuffier establishments (though the service quickly disimproves if they discover I'm a doctor of philosophy, not a surgeon). Still, at the time, it felt like a choice. There was the world, where you could be worldly, and there was the university, where you learnt how to use footnotes. The point of academe was to maintain a critical distance - to study, interrogate, extrapolate, theorise. You might write a thesis on celebrity, but you wouldn't pander to it. It did its thing, and you did yours. It had the power and money but you had the integrity - and the degree.

Of course, the two spheres have always overlapped more than this suggests. Many people lecture and research as well as directing plays or writing novels. Intellect isn't the preserve of academics. The Shakespearian acting of Jane Lapotaire (recently begowned by the University of Warwick) suggests more than a degree of cerebral activity. Ditto the Newsnight interviews of Kirsty Wark. But Cilla? To run Blind Date for as long as she has reveals powers of application few doctorate students can match. But I don't want to have to think of her as a boffin. I prefer her as she is. Cilla's degree was awarded by Liverpool John Moores University, in her home town, so perhaps local pride explains it. A similar claim to ownership was staked by Exeter University when it made its former student J K Rowling a doctor of letters.

There's also an argument that such awards redress the gender imbalance of the birthday honours list and Who's Who. My 1999 Who's Who contains no entries for influential women such as Jane Root (now controller of BBC2), Gail Rebuck (publisher), Susie Orbach (author and therapist), Barbara Trapido (novelist) or Mary-Kay Wilmers (editor of the London Review of Books). Scope for recognition there. But most universities follow each other like sheep, till Tessa Blackstone or Seamus Heaney can't move for scrolls. David Attenborough has 20 honorary degrees, Roy Jenkins 17. Nelson Mandela got eight during a one-week visit here in 1996.

The mystery is how they abide the ceremonials, which most of us ordinary hons prefer to skip but which honorary hons can't get out of so easily. " The worst thing about hon degs," wrote Philip Larkin, "is that even if you make it clear that you're not going to 'reply for the graduates', there's still an AWFUL dinner when you're next to Lady Somebody, and an awful LUNCH ... and a standing TEA, and when standing makes your legs like perished elastic AS IT DOES MINE and when you can't hear a fucking word anyone says anyway AS I CAN'T then such occasions fall a thought short of pleasurable."

No, nothing enviable there. But it still baffles me why universities should dole out honorary degrees the way they do. It's toadying and demeaning. They should have more sense.