Who knew?

More on the often cynical, high-risk business of honorary degrees here.

The abundant nut cases – most lately Elise VOTE FRAUD YES!!! Stefanik – are rapidly being removed from positions of responsibility, leaving a gaping hole where rational conservatives are supposed to be. I worry about Mitt being spread thin.

… UD‘s university now struggles with whether it made the right decision in spending tuition money to give this guy a stage, so he can sing this.

No, I mean the university promises that this guy promises not to sing that song at the Spring Fling.

“We hope students will continue to discuss Mr. Bronson and the entirety of his work and decide for themselves whether it has merit,” the organization wrote.

Because once you really open yourself to the guy’s oeuvre…

But I mean the program board has already decided his work has merit, yes? An aesthetic decision has been made by UD’s university, and that decision is that this guy and his music are meritorious.

Welcome, spring!

It happens. When La Kid graduated from George Washington University, now-disgraced honorary degree awardee Brian Williams gave an address in which he lectured UD on personal ethics.

UD‘s kinda hurt because Williams lied to her in his speech: He said it doesn’t pay to cheat, but it does pay to cheat, and he knows it cuz he’s back at his old job after suffering only un p’tit peu for being a cheat.

University coaches are of course – if they’re any good at all – cheaters. Americans know this and love them for it. Coaches do what they have to do to get ahead, just like Brian Williams.

It almost always does pay to cheat in college sports. Wins matter more than integrity. This isn’t exactly a revelation. As Jerry Tarkanian used to say, “Nine out of 10 schools are cheating. The other one is in last place.” …Cheating pays. We’ve learned this from roided-up baseball players who walked away with tens of millions of dollars, and from white-collar criminals whose sentences paled in comparison to those of small-time crack dealers.

You can blame it on a toothless NCAA, or on a college sports system that values the almighty dollar over platitudes of integrity, or on an American culture that values winning over all else.

I’ll call it something else: The fact that schools cheat – and that they get away with it – is a natural result of the odd marriage in America between big-money athletics and academics.

The reference up there to white collar criminals reminds me of one of my all-time favorite commencement speeches, from Allen Greenspan to the young eager hedgies of Wharton. It’s a fascinating address rhetorically. Greenspan knows he’s talking to many of the most-honed, highest-level cheaters America has to offer the world, people who can barely stay seated in their chair before peeling off and starting a Ponzi scheme; and indeed he knows that the background of his talk is the most recent immense number of immense American corporate scandals… So what’s he going to say? Isn’t it all rather… futile….?

I do not deny that many appear to have succeeded in a material way by cutting corners and manipulating associates, both in their professional and in their personal lives. But material success is possible in this world, and far more satisfying, when it comes without exploiting others. The true measure of a career is to be able to be content, even proud, that you succeeded through your own endeavors without leaving a trail of casualties in your wake.

All the herbal viagra in the world won’t make this less limp.

Just as it’s especially amusing to watch the winningest coaches shovel the moral shit in their books and speeches, it’s a special treat to watch income inequality’s biggest boosters dish out the do-goodery.

The only trouble mondo cheato ever runs into is when pesky university students decide to get all judgmental about some of the important inspirational people on their campus. It bothers Yalies that Bill Cosby has an honorary degree that their school refuses to revoke. Why does it refuse to revoke Cosby’s degree? Yale says two things in response to this question:

1. It’s never revoked a degree before. (And we all know that timid backwater places like Yale can never do anything new.)

2. It doesn’t want to talk about it. Shut up.

UD rather admires Yale’s unwillingness even to try to argue the point. (Northwestern, where UD was an undergrad, is also opting for silence.) Tons of universities have revoked Cosby’s honorary degrees, and they’ve stated their reasons, but Yale’s like eh I don’t know didn’t I tell you to shut up? It’s like Yale acknowledges what UD has been saying which is like Hello? Everybody’s an asshole and the biggest assholes get honorary degrees. Nuff said.

One university leader has, however, been willing to go there. One leader has ignored the wisdom of the keep-mum crowd and gone there. Let us consider Stephen Trachtenberg’s opinion piece in the campus newspaper. Scathing Online Schoolmarm will interrupt his sentences with her commentary.

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‘I was the GW president back in the day when we gave Bill Cosby an honorary degree. At the time, he was arguably the most popular Commencement speaker of my tenure. His remarks at graduation were received with an ovation. All attending cheered him. He was celebrated for his contributions to American culture and for his comic genius. [Spectacular dude. Was his dissertation majorly bogus? Should this matter to a university like yours as it honors him? Nah.]

It would appear, on the basis of information only now revealed, that he had, in addition to his artistic gifts, a dark and troubling and tragic hidden side. [Tragic. Da guy’s a regular Hamlet already!] Had we known of that we would not have awarded him plaudits. But we did not.

All today seem well-informed of Mr. Cosby’s seemingly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story. His life and reputation lie in tatters. One can only speculate on the mental health issues that may underlie the behavior that numerous women have reported regarding Mr. Cosby. [There, there. It’s all about his tragic mental issues. Let’s not get all moral about this… But UD can’t help wondering: Why didn’t Mr Cosby, during the century or so during which he drugged and assaulted women, consult someone about his troubling behavior? I guess had he known that he had psychological problems he would not have attacked all those women. But he did not.]

People of accomplishment can, as we know, also have criminal or evil characteristics. I think of Ezra Pound, a man of towering poetic, artistic and critical gifts, and a fascist war criminal who lived out his life in a prison hospital. [Yes. Pound was punished for what he did. And again unlike Cosby, Pound was indeed clinically insane. That’s why he was in a prison hospital. His Bollingen Prize was so controversial that Congress ended – revoked, if you like – the involvement of the Library of Congress in that award program.]

What good would it do to void Mr. Cosby’s diploma? Who actually celebrates it today? He is revealed and reviled. I am not keen on trying to rewrite history. We must own our past and learn from it. There is no Platonic device for awarding honors. We do our best to celebrate the good. We work with the best information available. But being human, we have erred in the past and will no doubt do so again in the future. [Enough platitudes for you? Mr Trachtenberg needs to go back and think about the many forms of public rejection, retraction, and revocation which have been a feature of the moral life of this country – and this country’s traditions – from the beginning. It does a lot of moral good – by way of clarification of one’s principles, and official removal from the community of people who seriously offend it – to void awards whose conferral turns out to have been a sick joke.]

We need to redouble our efforts to avoid such failures of judgement in the years to come but must in humility appreciate our limitations and permit experience to inform our thinking. There is a rough charm to the proposal that we should recall our degree from Mr. Cosby, but it is a blunt instrument that does not do real justice to the dreadful challenge it seeks to address. It does not actually get to right. It provides no real comfort to the abused. [How do you know? Have you heard what the abused have said? The obscenity of their attacker having been protected and even celebrated by the culture has featured prominently in their suffering. One of the reasons it took so long for law enforcement to catch up with Cosby was his many-laureled cultural identity, an identity to which GW contributed.]

Mr. Cosby knows that we no longer esteem him. Everybody knows. He is down. He is out. The degree is as null and void as it can be. It is self-executing. However much he may deserve it, I am disinclined to kick him again to underscore our own virtue. It’s too easy.’ [Oh yes, it’s just our virtue-narcissism at play. How contemptible of us.]

Why would anybody pay $675 for convicted swindler Bernie Madoff’s honorary diploma from Yeshiva University? The real question, exclaimed Rich Kroll, slapping his head after he got outbid for the diploma, is why anybody wouldn’t pay it.

“It’s history! It’s the big thing! It’s the biggest thing of the century!” said the anguished Kroll, a North Miami online retailer. “I should have bought it — I should have kept bidding. I dropped out at $600, because I only have $500 in my pocket, but I should have found a way! I wanted it!”

Miami Herald

… Brian Murray is under house arrest on charges of insurance fraud and theft, accused of stealing more than $1.3 million in premium payments collected from an assortment of businesses, schools and other organizations.

… Mr. Murray, 67, former head of Murray Insurance Agency Inc., was arrested late Thursday by agents from the state attorney general’s insurance fraud section and arraigned before Magisterial District Judge John Pesota. Some of the victims of the alleged fraud include Moses Taylor Hospital, Mount Airy Casino Resort and several Jesuit universities, including the University of Scranton, which gave Mr. Murray, an ardent financial supporter, an honorary degree in 2006. Mr. Murray allegedly took their premium payments but left them uninsured…

Serbia’s Interior Minister, a Megatrend grad, is accused of having plagiarized his doctorate.

So what. Academic plagiarism’s endemic in much of the world. Let’s not get too excited about brave little Serbia’s borrowings.

Let us instead extract what pleasure we can from their new megatrendy university that – taking a page from Benjamin Barber’s book – celebrates dictators.

This blog has long argued the importance of rescinding honorary degrees from, er, some of their recipients. Examples:

Bernard Madoff

Theodore McCarrick

Bill Cosby

Lance Armstrong

Sepp Blatter

Donald Trump

Sheldon Silver

James Levine

Almost all of these sex and/or money scumsters eventually lost the honor aura conferred upon them by America’s debauched universities (debauched because, in almost every case, a touch of due diligence would have uncovered enough rumors to stay their hand, but these schools apparently didn’t care).

But what about, say, a law degree? An actual degree you work for and pay for? Is there behavior dishonorable enough to justify rescinding a BA or a JD?

What about an MD? UD has argued that Jumana Nagarwala, who put her Hopkins MD to use allegedly slicing off the genitals of little girls all over the midwest, should have that degree rescinded under… call it the Mengele Rule. It’s pretty easy to argue that people who got BAs under false pretenses (as in the Varsity Blues case, where rejects took the place of qualified applicants because their parents faked their applications and paid various well-connected criminals enormous sums of money to help them) should have their degrees revoked. The principle here is that a legitimate university has a reputation to defend, and when it harbors filthy crooks it should formally, publicly, expel them.

And a lawyer? A student who attends your school in order to learn the laws of our land in order to use those same laws to destroy it? This is much like the 9/11 pilots who attended flight school here solely in order to crash their planes into buildings. It would seem to be rather at odds with the purpose of a legal education, a serious education in the rule of law in our democracy. If I were Chicago I’d be pretty fucking embarrassed to be the school that taught John Eastman the law solely in order for him to twist it to destroy the country. I mean, is my face red!

It’s not too early for UD‘s beloved U of C to start considering a process by which they can cleanly disassociate themselves from this piece of shit.

Until they took it down, the Royal Philharmonic conductors page included an entry on Charles Dutoit which listed some of his honorary degrees. They took it down because

Monsieur Dutoit
Is hot to trot.
All his Mais non!s
Have come to naught.

Will the schools revoke the degrees?

UD predicts that maybe one will follow the Nevernevernever Yale model (To be sure Dr Mengele performed some questionable surgeries, but we never revoke an honorary degree…), while the others will announce that they are passing Dutoit’s, uh, baton back to him.

Back in November 2014, in The Independent, Michael Calvin noted Sepp Blatter’s honorary degree from De Montfort University. The award’s citation reads in part: “He is forthright, visionary, ethical …”

And before you smirk – here are some other honorary degree recipients:

Bernie Madoff.

Lance Armstrong.

Jamie Dimon.

These seem to be the only two D. Trump honorary degrees that haven’t been revoked; and Trump can rest easy knowing that a school recently run by the Marquis de Jerry Falwell Junior will never do that dastardly deed, even under current circumstances.

It’s a 2017 announcement, from the Pharmacists Society of the State of New York, of that year’s Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Laurence Doud.

The criteria for this award is very selective and discerning. The award is intended to distinguish those who have the continued passion and dedication to pharmacy throughout the years… Doud has been one of the most influential and deeply committed executives to independent pharmacy.

Move on to this Albany College of Pharmacy honorary degree citation:

After decades of consolidation, most industry observers in the 1980’s believed that independent pharmacy would not survive. Larry Doud was not one of those people. Since he joined Rochester Drug Cooperative (RDC) in 1987, RDC has become one of the nation’s largest drug wholesalers, serving community pharmacies and home health care dealers (and by extension, patients) in eight states. During that time, RDC has helped launch and maintain more than 400 independent pharmacies – including the College’s own student operated pharmacies. Since the early 2000’s, the number of independent pharmacies has remained relatively stable, in part due to the efforts of people like Larry who understand that independent pharmacists remain an important part of the nation’s health care system.

As Larry’s carted off to jail for having flooded the Northeast corridor with opiates, let us pause on that independent and ask why Larry was so eager to foster his own independent chain of pharmacies unhampered by any large corporate controls… Let us also ask why Larry’s awards/honors/praise remain intact today on the websites of pharma organizations and schools. Just what are they trying to say?

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Prosecutors asked for “15 years in prison, saying that he should be held accountable for the ‘shattering impact’ his actions had on people to whom he had unlawfully funneled opioids.” He got two and a half.

… all stand steadfastly with their much-admired Rudy Giuliani, a man so fine as to have been given honorary degrees from them.

Three of these schools are Catholic, and Catholics tend to be YUGE Trump supporters, so don’t hold your breath waiting for them to revoke the honor, even after he’s disbarred in total disgrace, imprisoned, etc., etc.

Middlebury College in Vermont, Drexel University in Pennsylvania, and the University of Rhode Island have all revoked honorary degrees that each school, in a moment of madness, conferred upon America’s close-to-highest-profile anti-semitic (Look ye to Soros, oh Blind Ones!) insurrectionist. These are godless public or private schools, lacking the spiritual perspicacity to see the Christlike miracle that is America’s Mayor.

And then there’s godless Syracuse, which is as we speak attempting to work RG out of its system. That school, too, fails to perceive the way in which Rudy acts as a vessel of the lord. The three Catholic schools sure as hell do, though, and when Rudy’s carted off to jail they will speak of his having been burned at the stake just like Saint Joan.

Figure it this way: If, for decades and decades, the most laureled person on your campus was Theodore McCarrick, ol’ Rudy don’t look too bad.

A security expert goes to the precise analogy: ISIS. Think ISIS and you can begin to think clearly about how to end our national nightmare. Make our native ISIS undergo decline.

Trump’s insistence that, despite all evidence, he won the election helped Democrats win both Georgia seats. Not even his followers can depend on him: Under pressure, he essentially conceded the election on Thursday, which meant either that he is unreliable or that he was lying to them the whole time. He has limited access to effective communication forums, most notably Twitter and Facebook. The platforms’ decision to suspend his accounts was controversial, but deplatforming is a successful counterterrorism technique that, although it may galvanize diehards, impedes a movement leader’s ability to reach new members. The MAGA-world leadership team is in disarray; Pence plans to attend Biden’s inauguration. In welcoming Pence to the event—“I’d be honored to have him there,” the president-elect said—Biden is replicating a common divide-and-conquer counterterrorism strategy that amplifies distrust and leads to paranoia among those who remain inside an extremist group. Companies such as American Express are pulling support for members of Congress who went along with Trump’s effort to block the certification of the electoral vote.

… The United States is a divided nation, but only a tiny fraction of Trump’s more than 74 million voters showed up in Washington, D.C., eager to fight. The way to unite this country is to isolate acts of violence—and a leader who incites it—from legitimate expression. Trump was a north star for a certain kind of radical. Americans will be safer the more that star loses its shine.

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The particular analogy for the terrorists’ House and Senate enthusiasts is the mentally challenged young women from European cities who flew off to Syria and fucked one ISIS terrorist after another in order to push out squads of ISIS babies. As these moronic post-ISIS degenerates try to crawl back to England without the citizenship papers that they – whoops! – gleefully burned in YouTubes declaring their new citizenship in a caliphate dedicated to the torture and death of all Britons, they find that they are encountering… oddly… a little trouble being welcomed back.

No self-respecting democratic governing body should ever welcome back the Hawleys and Cruzes and all the others in both houses who revealed their depravity by fucking with domestic terrorism.

Most will, I believe, be voted out in the next cycle; meanwhile, enjoy the manifold forms of shunning — withdrawal of various forms of corporate support; demands for return of donations; rejection of awards, removal of honorary degrees; disbarment; expulsion from a wide variety of civic and private groups, etc., etc. — which all of the elected insurrectionists are currently experiencing. It is a small but important part of what this security expert is talking about – the degradation of the Trump brand.

Epstein indeed has a long list of complaints about the falling off of moral and intellectual seriousness among university presidents. To which UD once again has to say: What a bald-faced hypocrite.

The university president who conferred Epstein’s one honorary degree – his crony, Peter Diamandopoulos of Adelphi University – was little more than a thief, who was made to reimburse the university for at least some of the money and perks to which he helped himself.

The sole university president in the country who considered Joseph Epstein worthy of an honorary degree was so corrupt that his tenure at Adelphi has a whole book about corruption devoted to it: SUNY Buffalo sociologist Lionel Lewis wrote, a few years after the ignominious fall of this greedy, amoral man, When Power Corrupts: Academic Governing Boards in the Shadow of the Adelphi Case.

If Epstein had a bit of decency, he’d return – or at least repudiate – this heavily soiled honor.

So by all means let us be lectured on university ethics by Diamandopoulos’s boy!