Snow said there were several attempts to get Cosby or his representatives to appear on “The Cosby Accusers Speak”, to be broadcast on the network where the comic had his greatest success during the 1980s. “Equally appalling is his longtime strategy of denigrating the reputations of women who accused him of such actions”.
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Jeremy Travis, the president of John Jay, said a proposal to rescind Cosby’s degree was “under very active consideration at the moment”.
At least two of them come from Alabama schools – Talladega College and Miles College.
Do the universities do this for everyone it has given an honorary degree?
“As an actor, a humorist and a citizen, Bill Cosby has been one of America’s most eloquent advocates for education and the value of developing every individual mind”, Carnegie Mellon’s president, Jared Cohon, said in 2007 when Cosby received his degree. NBC also was inspired by a New York magazine cover story this summer that gathered many of Cosby’s accusers together for a photograph, although Snow said the network had begun working to gather the interviews before that. “It’s a spiritual experience”.
At the start of the rally, Sloan awarded Cosby the honorary doctorate and called him “the icon of American comedy” and one who “turned a hard childhood into a rich tapestry of comedy”.
In September 2003 Cosby donned the university’s colors and put on a free performance for about 20,000 people in which he dispensed advice on dealing with loss that was peppered with jokes.
Though in wide use, the practice of awarding honorary degrees has always been in question.
While scientists have documented cases of tiny flies infesting honeybees, causing the bees to lurch and stagger around like zombies before they die, researchers don’t know the scope of the problem.
Wilkes University has become the latest school to rescind an honorary degree it granted Bill Cosby. Morehouse College in Atlanta has similarly not rescinded a 1983 honorary degree it gave Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, who has a much criticized record on human rights. “In contrast, the petition to revoke John Brennan’s honorary degree emerged from the Fordham community itself, was vigorously debated by proponents and opponents alike, and had the support of more than 700 faculty, students, staff, and alumni, only to be rejected on the flimsiest grounds”. And many college students today are often barely familiar with past honorees.
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We may not have to wait for all 60, since a few institutions, like Boston University and Yale, are standing by their original decisions. “Most of the students now don’t even know who Bill Cosby is unless they look at Netflix or something like that”.
