Viscount Ridley will be retiring as chancellor of the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in December.
A special honorary degree congregation in his honour will confer honorary doctorates of civil law upon the following: Lord Carrington, former foreign secretary; Lord Glenamara, chancellor of the University of Northumbria and former secretary of state for education and science; Alan Beith, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats; Cyril Davies, former chief executive of Newcastle City Council and Harry Faulkner-Brown, an architect who has won renown for designing university libraries in Newcastle, Iceland and China.
Booker prize winner Barry Unsworth has been awarded an honorary doctorate of literature by The University of Manchester.
The university has also awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree to Baroness McFarlane of Llandaff, former professor of nursing at the university and the first professor of nursing in England.
Robert Worcester, chairman of MORI, has been made an honorary doctor of science by the University of Buckingham.
Zygmunt Bauman, professor of sociology and social policy at the University of Leeds, has been awarded the Adorno Prize for Sociology for his 1989 book Modernity and the Holocaust.
Duncan Dowson, professor in the school of mechanical engineering at Leeds, has been awarded the 1998 Kelvin Medal for application of science to engineering.
Peter Buckley, professor of international business at Leeds University's centre for international business, has been awarded an honorary professorship at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, China.