He lectured on art at Columbia University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Peabody Institute of Baltimore and the Art Institute of Chicago; his Scammon Lectures of 1904-05 in Chicago were published under the title "The Interdependence of the Arts of Design" (1905). Sturgis received the honorary degrees of MA from Yale in 1870 and PhD from the College of the City of New York in 1893. A disciple of John Ruskin, Sturgis intensely disliked the trend toward neoclassic eclecticism at the end of the 19th century and hailed Louis H. Sullivan's work as the most significant that was being done in America.