He was Chancellor of the Open University (1978–94) and in May 1979 was awarded an honorary degree as Doctor of the University. He was an Honorary Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge from 1968, Worcester College, Oxford from 1969 and St Catharine's College, Cambridge, from 1977. He held a visiting appointment at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University in the late 1980s and again at the renamed Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia in 1995–96. Announced in the 1976 Birthday Honours, he was created a life peer as Baron Briggs, of Lewes in the County of East Sussex on 19 July 1976.