Hmmmm.
Here are the distinguished individuals Harvard saw fit to award honorary degrees to at graduation this year. (I’m sure some of them, heck, maybe all, are very fine people) :
- Gustavo Dudamel, music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, his home country, and music and artistic director-designate of the New York Philharmonic
- Jennie Chin Hansen, immediate past chief executive of the American Geriatrics Society, and past president of AARP—a pioneer in care for the elderly.
- Sylvester James Gates Jr., Clark Leadership Chair in Science and Distinguished University Professor and a University System of Maryland Regents Professor, a theoretical physicist who has worked on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory.
- Joy Harjo, twenty-third Poet Laureate of the United States, 2019-2022, the author of 10 books of poetry (plus plays, children’s books, and two volumes of memoir), and a performing musician who played for many years with her band, Poetic Justice, and has produced seven albums.
- Maria A. Ressa, co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 (with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov) for her brave, independent news coverage of her native Philippines.
(Former Harvard president Lawrence Bacow also got an honorary degree, but ex-Harvard presidents always do if they manage not to get fired for plagiarism, so he doesn’t count.)
Interesting. Out of five honorees, not one was a white American, not even a white woman, or a white LGTBQ warrior. A Venezuelan male, a female Filipino, Harjo is Native American, Gates is black, and Hansen is Asian American.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Week is…
Is there anything wrong with this roster?
There shouldn’t be. In a healthy, color-blind, merit-based society like we are supposed to have, I would regard this selection as just the luck of the draw. But as Claudine Gay famously reminded us, context matters. Harvard is DEI obsessed. It recently had to kick out its DEI-focused President who was a DEI fanatic as dean and who built her career on DEI “scholarship.” Harvard can’t discriminate against white men any more in admissions, so it has to signal its woke virtue in other ways.
I would have thought that under the circumstances, Old Ivy might have found a Jewish personage of accomplishment and fame to honor, but no, I’m sure the school was afraid of riots, or something.
Imagine: in a nation where about 70% of the population is white, our most prestigious university (crummy and incompetent as it is) still couldn’t identify a single artist, writer, activist, public servant, scientist, doctor, lawyer or innovator as worthy of an honorary degree as, well, take your pick. Is, say, Martin Scorsese as significant to the culture as a Native American children’s book writer? I know she’s a poet laureate: now name five more. Better yet, name your favorite poem by her. Bill James has transformed the National Pastime as well as made millions of baseball fans more aware of mathematics, statistics and critical thought. He’s never been awarded an honorary degree. Stephen King is one of the most influential novelists in US literary history, and he’s a New Englander to boot. His alma mater, the University of Maine, gave him an honorary degree in the last century. That’s it. Bruce Springsteen is one of the most honored and popular singers ever, and has received a Presidential Medal of Freedom, but never an honorary degree.
I think this is bigotry, flat out.
Ethics Alarms 
My initial reaction was so what. Whether or not it was bigoted is anyone’s guess.
If we assume it was based on DEI in every instance we cannot move toward that colorblind society and it gives grievance groups one more thing to label as racist.
If the practice continues year after year we might be able to draw some negative conclusions but for now I am willing to assume it was the luck of the draw.
I see no reason to give Harvard the benefit of the doubt on this, not based on what I’ve seen for the last decade. Choosing an unqualified, DEI President is a lot riskier than just ignoring whites at honorary degree time, and Harvard still went with Gay, getting a debacle in return. This discrimination is safe.
As I have so often said, the Left has long since forfeited the benefit of Hanlon’s Razor.
Jack.
I am trying to be less cynical and perhaps even hopeful or at least giving the benefit of the doubt. Maybe Extradimensional cephalopod is having some effect.
Well, statistically, there is only a 0.2% chance that you would randomly select 5 people in this country without selecting one who was white. Since the generally standard for reasonableness is less than 5% random chance, this is racist to very good statistical significance. The only way it isn’t if the fields were predetermined and those fields have few whites in them. For example, if there was some kind of rotation like below
(1) Physical Sciences
(2) Education
(3) Medicine
(4) Literature
(5) Performing Arts
(6) Visual Arts
(7) Biological Sciences
When you get to education, you will have very few men to choose from. The fields don’t seem to correlate with areas with fewer whites, however. In physics, 79% of the faculty are white and 15% Asian (only 2% black), so there is almost no chance the selection wasn’t based on race. There are only about 30,000 Seminole in the world.
The racial breakdown looks like a DEI checklist
Hispanic
East Asian
Black
Seminole
Filipino
No repeats. There aren’t 2 hispanics, etc.
If you worked out the probability of randomly selecting such a group with the respecive percentages in their fields, you would probably have better odds winning $1 million in the lottery this weekend.
Honorary degrees, Nobel peace prizes… Nobel other prizes, the Doomsday Clock.
Arbitrarily given public recognitions made by people who don’t care about their biases.
Some started out good, but ultimately because they weren’t *directly* earned by people actively pursuing them according to some standard applied to them, they become just another way to “approve” of a certain set of ideas by granting those ideas extra attention.
Did the recipients achieve greatly? Sure. Do they deserve accolades…probably.
Does that mean Harvard wasn’t specifically aiming a certain direction in their recognition?
Nope.
Exactly what is the value of these honorary degrees? Seems to me we have a lot of people being awarded degrees for not much other than paying to attend.
To me the only value is to the narcissistic tendencies of the recipient.
“To me the only value is to the narcissistic tendencies of the recipient.”
Howse about the grantor’s attendant Gosh I’m Nice/I’m Dialed In/Look At Me endorphin goosing virtue signaling?
PWS
With Harvard’s racist and bigoted history going back decades, it is hard for me to believe their selection criteria aren’t more of the same. However, ask me if I care.
God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
Or as the Polish proverb suggests, “Not my circus, not my monkeys”.
While I abhor that Harvard pollutes and warps the minds of their students, I can’t do anything about it. I can’t change Harvard’s culture.
What the Harvard Trustees and progressives everywhere don’t fully realize yet is that their time has come and gone. At long last the world is starting to understand that the tenants of progressivism are unworkable and destructive except for a few. The progressives have had a little over 100 years to make their case to deliver eutopia to the world and they have failed miserably.
The Right is gaining ground in Europe and Canada. The progressive’s failures are the reason why they feel Trump must be stopped by whatever means necessary.
In Europe, countries are cracking down on illegal immigration. Sweden is calling in the army to help deal with a surge in gang violence, much of it related to its previously porous border.
How Europe is Slowly Closing Its Doors to Asylum-Seekers
Progressive’s diminishing popularity can be seen in their ever-increasing efforts to censor speech and infringe on the Second Amendment. Their continued expansion of income redistribution to buy votes spurs money printing and increasing inflation. I believe you buy votes with cash when ideology fails to win you votes. Hopefully, the swinging of the pendulum to the right will not be too destructive. I have my doubts. The progressive Democrats have a history of supporting violence to achieve their ends.
Funny how DEI has devolved into exoticism. Anything and anyone who’s not standard issue, white bread American is prized. It’s akin to what driving a foreign car was in the ‘sixties. And loving America is objectionable nationalism and populism but if a foreigner loves their country, it’s cute. Being a Christian is unacceptable but being a Muslim is admirable. It’s uncool to have any American looking stuff on your car, but a Mexican flag is wonderful. Again, where are these university administrators coming from?
Maybe there should be an ethics discussion about honorary doctorates. Here are some thoughts
Unethical reasons to give an honorary doctorate:
(1) The person gave a bunch of money
(2) The person already has an earned doctorate in the area, but everyone is giving them an honorary doctorate, or they are a hot celebrity right now and this is the only way you can get them to speak at your institution.
(3) You want the person to give a bunch of money.
(4) The administration or faculty are using the honorary doctorate to make a political point (possibly the current Harvard case).
Ethical Reasons:
(1) An alum contributed significantly to their field or society, and never got an advanced degree. Maybe an alum with a B.S. was integral in the space program and you want to recognize them as an inspiration to the university.
(2) A person unrelated to the university contributed to society and you want to recognize their work. Suppose someone started a small business in your area and turned it into a huge business that has greatly benefited the community. Perhaps someone dedicated their life to bringing clean water to impoverished parts of the world, they are now retired, and you want to recognize their work as an inspiration.
I also think these should be rare. I don’t think they need to be handed out at every graduation. Every school handing out a handful of honorary doctorates every graduation diminishes the accomplishments of earned doctorates. Of course, the proliferation of doctorates is doing that already. BYU used to have an Ed.D. that you could get in one summer.* Three months from B.A. to doctorate. Imagine sitting in a faculty meeting with such an Ed.D. who insists that their degree is equal to a Physics Ph.D. that took 10 years of 60+ hour weeks to earn.
*The reason for the degree is that elementary schools started requiring their principal to have ‘doctorates’. Since they normally promoted a B.A. teacher to principal, they ‘needed’ a way to get them a doctorate by August. Yet another example of academia missing the point.