Eight impressive individuals -- including a Nobel Laureate, Emmy Award winning actress and the chief economic advisor to President Reagan -- will receive honorary degrees from Dartmouth at commencement on June 8th. Hopefully none of them will cause as much controversy as University of Massachusetts's honorary degree beneficiary, Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe.
Over the last year, students and outside representatives have campaigned hard to have UMass rescind the degree it awarded Mugabe back in 1986, before he became known as a brutal pseudo-dictator who rules Zimbabwe with a cruel and bloody fist. On the surface, actions taken by the university's president, undergraduate student senate, and most recently a Massachusetts state representative denouncing Mugabe and calling for the trustees to revoke the degree seem reasonable and justified. He is, after all, internationally blamed for his country's economic collapse and has been accused of massive human rights abuses in crackdowns on minority tribes in Zimbabwe.
Yet the righteous indignation of these public calls serves only to score cheap political points without considering the pointlessness of the broader issue -- namely, that revoking the honorary degree does absolutely nothing except save UMass a little face.
The idealistic students who have coordinated petitions on the subject would like to believe that by taking away his degree, their university would shame Mugabe and send him a message that the rest of the world will not tolerate his actions. This, quite frankly, is a joke.
In fact, last year Edinburgh University already made the Zimbabwean president the first international personage to ever be stripped of an honorary degree by a British school. And unless the purpose was to compel the Zimbabwean government to call the decision a "humiliation" for the University and Edinburgh a "disgrace," nothing happened.
In a Boston Globe column, Kevin Cullen referred to the UMass trustees' previous reaction, a letter written last year to Mugabe that conveyed disapproval of his conduct, as "yawning." He sarcastically wrote, "This [letter], no doubt, bothered Mugabe no end." But repealing his purely symbolic doctorate will? I guess when Mugabe applies for his next job he will not be able to list a UMass diploma. Of course, the man still has seven other degrees to fall back on.
The unfortunate truth is that anything UMass does or does not do will have absolutely zero effect on anyone outside of its office of public relations. The United States and other Western countries have already enacted economic sanctions and have spoken out against Mugabe and his administration. If UMass' board of trustees wants to add another voice to that criticism, it can go right ahead -- and maybe people will think a little better of that institution.
But ultimately, whether UMass or Michigan State University, which honored Mugabe in 1990, revokes his degree or not, the schools cannot escape the truth that they chose to associate themselves with and praise the Zimbabwean president, despite evidence that suggested he was not the liberator he pretended to be. Twenty-thousand people are thought to have died because of Mugabe between 1982 and 1984.
Joshua Rubenstein, Northeast regional director for Amnesty International USA, said in an interview with the Boston Globe, "In 1986, it was already clear this was a brutal regime that has been murderous. The idea that he would warrant an honorary degree was very questionable at the time."
Hopefully the struggle with free elections to unseat Mugabe will end soon in Zimbabwe and democracy will reign once again.
It is an important issue internationally and we should all pay attention. However, revoking his honorary (read: meaningless) degrees simply wastes everyone's time.
