The University Wants Back the Honorary Degree, Please

You’ve heard the news: All those allegations of sexual assault against Bill Cosby have done significant damage to his public image. And now the decline of his reputation has accelerated in academic circles. The list of colleges that have chosen to revoke honorary degrees that they awarded to Mr. Cosby — he’s said to have received dozens — appears to be growing with each passing month.

The revocations have received attention in part because such a decision is so rare. Colleges collectively dole out countless such awards each year; Harvard University gave out 10 at its spring 2015 commencement alone. The sheer volume of honorary degrees might make them seem trivial, but they are public signifiers of approval from influential institutions.

But even as some colleges have moved to cut ties with Mr. Cosby, others have chosen not to do so. The debate highlights some of the questions that colleges grapple with when a figure they honored in the past faces a growing public outcry.

For most colleges, honorary degrees are “the highest award an institution can give,” says Dan L. King, president of the American Association of University Administrators. Mr. King, who earned his doctorate in education by “taking a lot of notes and passing a lot of exams,” he says, tells honorees that the honorary degree can carry more prestige, because it’s given “for extraordinary contributions” to society. Recipients can be scholars or activists, authors (like Elie Wiesel, who has more than 100 degrees), or presidents (George W. Bush, for example).

The degrees are also given to benefactors who exemplify a university’s values, says Mr. King. While honorees don’t have to be alumni or donors or the commencement speaker or a well-known face, they often are. Some academics criticize the honors as “a lure to get famous names” for publicity, says Joseph A. Burns, a professor of engineering and dean of the university faculty at Cornell University. Others protest that “all degrees should have basis in academic study,” says Mr. King.

A few institutions, including Cornell, don’t award honorary degrees. Cornell has felt pressure from some wealthy donors, who have suggested they would love such an honor, says Mr. Burns. But the Board of Trustees continues to say no. Degrees “ought to mean something,” says Mr. Burns. “Just as you shouldn’t be getting a free ride, you shouldn’t get a degree because you have a lot of money and gave it to the school.”

Stanford University keeps the focus on those who have earned academic diplomas, so as not to “diminish degrees for people who have worked very hard to earn them,” says Lisa Lapin, associate vice president for university communication.

‘Sufficient Shame’

For most institutions that award honorary degrees, Mr. Burns says, revoking one “is a big deal.”

When a college chooses to rescind a degree, the honoree has “brought sufficient shame as to no longer be worthy of an institution’s highest recognition,” says Mr. King. It’s a college saying that “these actions are so egregious that we can’t let it stand.”

Many institutions don’t even have a revocation policy in place, says Paul J. Tringale, secretary of the corporation at Tufts University. Colleges award them “based on current accomplishments” and “information that was available at the time,” he says. To reverse the decision “is difficult for anybody when that person has been vetted through a process” and “did not live up to expectations.” Tufts awards about five such degrees per year and has rescinded only two: Mr. Cosby’s, in October, and the former professional cyclist Lance Armstrong’s.

Universities that have a close relationship with an honoree face an especially difficult choice. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst has no plans to renounce its honorary degree to Mr. Cosby, who is a graduate of its master’s and doctoral programs — and a significant donor — because he has not been criminally charged, says Robert S. Feldman, deputy chancellor. The university did ask Mr. Cosby to step down as a co-chair of its $300-million capital campaign last November. (Although more than 40 women have publicly accused him of sexual misconduct, he has not faced criminal charges and has repeatedly denied the allegations against him.)

George Washington University said it would also let Mr. Cosby’s honorary degree stand, because, as it said in a written statement this month, “it has never been the university’s practice to rescind a degree.”

Some people believe that the degrees, while significant when they are conferred, honor a person at just that point in history. The honoree’s connection to the institution becomes “nebulous” after many years, says Charles A. Garris, a professor of engineering at George Washington and chair of its Faculty Senate.

“If you look back in history, I’m sure we gave honorary degrees to a lot of unworthy people,” says Mr. Garris. “Should you try to go back and change it? I think it’s better to move on and forget unless there is some lasting connection.”

The ‘Self-Canceling’ Degree

The awarding of such degrees comes with risk, says Stephen J. Trachtenberg, president emeritus and a professor of public service at George Washington, who was president when Mr. Cosby was a commencement speaker, in 1997. If Mr. Trachtenberg could go back in time, he says, he would not award the degree to Mr. Cosby. But if an honoree is “subsequently determined to be a felon,” he says, “the degree is self-canceling, and no further action is necessary on the part of the institution which unwisely awarded the degree in the first place.”

Mr. Trachtenberg says he would rather do “something positive” on the campus “in lieu of this largely symbolic gesture” of revocation.

These decisions can turn attention away from more important questions that colleges should be asking, says Laura J. Briggs, chair of women, gender, and sexuality studies at UMass.

She doesn’t have strong feelings about Mr. Cosby’s honorary degree, because revoking it appears to be an “easy way to profess concern about the problem of sexual assault on university campuses without doing the hard work of listening to students who have been sexually assaulted,” Ms. Briggs said in an email to The Chronicle. “This is very hard work that universities need to do, and no amount of vilifying someone like Bill Cosby who has been accused and convicted in the media absolves us of it.”

Faculty members elsewhere worry about the message sent by keeping an honorary degree in place under new circumstances. Because the process of revocation is most often decided by a governing board or a campus committee, many people have no idea that the discussion is happening until an announcement is made.

Had George Washington’s faculty or student body been invited to weigh in on the process of what to do about Mr. Cosby’s degree, the decision might have turned out differently, says Jennifer C. James, an associate professor of English who is a member of the university’s Committee on Sexual Assault Prevention and Response.

“The decision to not revoke Bill Cosby’s degree is unfortunate,” she said in an email to The Chronicle. “Colleges and universities across the country have used this circumstance to decide precisely what their institutions stand for,” she wrote, citing several of the colleges that had chosen to revoke Mr. Cosby’s honor. George Washington’s administration, she said, had “instead concluded that because there is no precedent for revocation at our university, Cosby should not be the exception.”

Kathryn A. Kleppinger, an assistant professor of French at George Washington, emphasizes how important the decision on Mr. Cosby could be for survivors of sexual assault. “We owe it to the women who came forward and to the women of our school to acknowledge that speaking up will be taken seriously,” she says.

The editorial board of the student newspaper, The GW Hatchet, called the nonrevocation the “wrong decision.”

For Ms. James, the evidence against Mr. Cosby should not go unaddressed. “At minimum,” she said, “we have lost an opportunity for an important conversation.”