Stormzy has been awarded an honorary law doctorate from the University of Cambridge, to recognise his philanthropic work.
The rapper, 31, has initiated various schemes across sport and the arts outside his chart-topping music career, such as founding his Merky Books imprint which champions Black British authors, and buying out the football team AFC Croydon Athletic with the intention of turning it into a “community asset”.
He already has ties with the university, launching the Stormzy Scholarship programme in 2018 which funded two Black British students a year. It expanded in 2021 to 12 students per year, in a partnership with HSBC.
Stormzy’s Cambridge doctorate is his second honorary degree, after receiving one in 2022 from the University of Exeter “in recognition of his outstanding achievements in the field of higher education philanthropy and widening participation”.
Also recognised with an honorary Cambridge doctorate this year is another esteemed British musician, though from a rather different sphere: choral composer John Rutter.
Other honourees are the American professor Angela Davis, actor Simon Russell Beale, former supreme court justice Mary Arden, Nobel prize-winning economist Oliver Hart, biologist Maria Leptin and Olympic gold medal-winning rower Katherine Grainger, who is chair of UK Sport and chancellor of the University of Glasgow.
Following Stormzy’s win in the rap act category at the Brit awards earlier this month, the Cambridge doctorate is the latest bright spot of news for him after some bruising weeks in the public eye.
After launching a new advertising partnership with McDonald’s in February, his social media was flooded with comments which criticised the campaign. Stormzy has been a vocal supporter of Palestine, but McDonald’s is the target of a global boycott over its activity in Israel: the country’s former franchise owner, Alonyal, gave free food to Israeli soldiers in October 2023.
Stormzy addressed the criticism, saying amid a long Instagram post: “I understand it must feel disappointing and disheartening when it seems like someone you’ve championed has compromised their beliefs for commercial gain but this isn’t the case here”.
He is expected to release a fourth studio album later this year.
