Bob Dylan has received an honorary doctorate from the Berklee College of Music.
The 84-year-old music legend has been recognised as a “great teacher and learner” of music by the prestigious institution for the study of the arts.
The college will celebrate with a concert dedicated to the Like A Rolling Stone hitmaker on Wednesday (05.11.25), though Dylan won’t be in attendance.
The last time he received such an honour from a US institution was back in 1970 from Princeton University.
Dylan – who dropped out of the University of Minnesota in 1959 to focus on music – said in a statement: “Thank you, Berklee College of Music, for bestowing on me this prestigious honour. What a pleasant surprise.
“Who knows what path my career might have taken if I’d been fortunate enough to learn from some of the great musicians who taught at Berklee. It’s something to think about.”
Jim Lucchese, Berklee President, said: “This is an incredible moment for this institution.
“Bob Dylan’s music has shaped how the world hears itself. He’s an artist who has never stopped evolving, who keeps chasing truth through sound and language. That’s the spirit we try to cultivate here every day.
“Honouring him feels like a reaffirmation of the creative impulse that built this place.”
Matt Glaser, Berklee’s American Roots Music Program artistic director, added: “Bob Dylan has spent a lifetime learning, absorbing, and transforming every American song tradition, and Berklee strives to teach all the music that Dylan loves.
“His deep immersion in African American blues parallels much of Berklee’s curriculum, which is rooted in the distinctly American variants of the music of the African diaspora.”
He continued: “As anyone who has read his books or listened to his hundred-plus radio programs can attest, Dylan is also a great teacher and learner. He shows us how to keep learning about music and the arts our whole lives through, and to embrace it all as one thing.
“I love the anecdote Dylan himself tells: he once went up to Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot in Greenwich Village, introduced himself, and said, ‘I play folk music down the street’. Monk replied, ‘We all play folk music.'”
Meanwhile, the Blowin’ In The Wind singer is set to kick off the UK leg of his Rough And Rowdy Ways tour on Friday (07.11.25) at the Brighton Centre.
He will then head to Swansea, Coventry, Leeds, Glasgow, Belfast, Killarney, and Dublin.