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For centuries, prestigious Yale University has been awarding honorary degrees as a way of recognizing a distinguished visitor’s contributions to a specific field or to society in general.
The honor has been bestowed on entertainers, politicians and everyone in between, including the likes of Aretha Franklin, Martin Scorsese, George H.W. Bush and hundreds of others. Yale has not rescinded one of those honorary degrees.
But the fact that Bill Cosby is one of those entertainers who received an honorary degree in 2003 does not sit well with alumni and others since he is accused criminally of drugging and sexually violating a woman at his suburban Philadelphia home more than a decade ago. Cosby is also facing two sexual assault lawsuits and a dozen defamation claims brought by women who came forward too late to sue over sexual assault.
The honorary degree awarded to Swiss billionaire Stephan Schmidheiny is also raising objections. Schmidheiny was convicted criminally in Italy for creating an environmental disaster that killed thousands of people who were exposed to asbestos.
Several alumni have urged Yale officials to rescind honorary degrees awarded to Cosby and Schmidheiny, and now a Connecticut lawyer has joined the effort.
Christopher Meisenkothen, of Early, Lucarelli, Sweeney & Meisenkothen in New Haven, has handled asbestos litigation for victims across the country. He was approached by the Asbestos Victims and Relatives Association formed in Italy to champion their cause, including efforts to rescind Schmidheiny’s degree. Meisenkothen agreed to help as a pro bono effort. Over the past couple of years, he has penned letters to school officials and recently spoke at an on-campus seminar explaining why Schmidheiny’s degree should be rescinded.
Despite his best efforts, Yale has expressed no interest in rescinding any honorary degrees. The school, in its most recent short statement in reference to Cosby, said “the university has never rescinded an honorary degree and has not rescinded his.”
Meisenkothen told the Law Tribune, “The Cosby issue is, of course, important in its own right, but it’s also important for the Schmidheiny matter because it demonstrates a real need for Yale to have some mechanism to review honorary degrees that may have been improvidently granted in the past.
“It’s morally, ethically, intellectually and academically indefensible for Yale to simply assert that it has never revoked an honorary degree,” he added. “That’s a vacuous, content-free nonanswer. Saying that they have never done it is not a justification for failing to do it in appropriate cases.”
In 1996, Yale awarded Schmidheiny an honorary degree for his work as a “green” businessman who used his wealth to fund sustainable development in Latin America and elsewhere. Schmidheiny was chief executive officer of Eternit, an asbestos-cement company.
A trial court in Italy sentenced him in 2012 to 16 years in prison for causing more than 2,000 deaths in Casale Monferrato, Italy, a town of 36,000 in the country’s Piedmont region. Eternit had a manufacturing plant there.
The following year an appeals court in Turin, Italy, upheld the conviction and increased the sentence to 18 years. Schmidheiny has not served any prison time as he’s continued to appeal the rulings.
Meisenkothen said the plant in Casale was still using tons of crocidolite asbestos in 1981, although it had long been recognized as the most potent type for causing mesothelioma. He said it is an extremely dangerous mineral responsible for as many as 16 to 18 percent of all deaths in some other occupational groups that worked with it. Meisenkothen said there were documented cases of mesothelioma in Casale by family members of plant workers and even people who just lived near the facility. He said there are few other locations around the world where so many deaths and so much environmental contamination have been caused by a single source of asbestos.
Yale issued a statement about Schmidheiny after concerns over his honorary degree surfaced a couple years ago.
“The decision to award this degree was made by a committee that considered Mr. Schmidheiny’s full record as a philanthropist who used his wealth to fund sustainable development in Latin America and elsewhere, and a path-breaking international advocate of change in the way businesses address environmental sustainability, as well as a businessman who inherited and dismantled a decades-old family asbestos processing concern,” read the statement. “Yale does not believe that the ongoing legal proceedings in Italy provide cause to reconsider the judgment made by the committee in 1996.”
Meisenkothen said he considered pursuing legal action against Yale. He said the process so far has been “disappointing and disillusioning to say the least.”
“I’ve given a lot of thought to possible grounds for a legal claim against Yale, but I think there isn’t anything that can be done in that regard,” said Meisenkothen. “This is really a policy issue and a question of good governance and corporate ethics. Yale is a private institution and honorary degrees are awarded by the Yale Corporation’s committee on honorary degrees.
“There don’t seem to be any legal claims that would apply for Italian victims of the Eternit factory to pursue legal action in U.S. courts against a private university over the award or reconsideration of any honorary degree,” continued Meisenkothen. “On this particular matter, Yale is only subject to its own conscience, community pressure and/or basic considerations of decency, fairness and justice.”
A well-known law professor at Temple University‘s Beasley School of Law is leading a similar charge to get Temple to rescind Cosby’s honorary degree there. Marina Angel, who has taught at the law school for the past 38 years, drafted a memo urging the university to rescind the honorary degree, which was adopted by her peers in Temple’s Faculty Senate late last year. Angel, who spent the past semester in Japan and could not be reached for comment, co-wrote Temple’s anti-sexual assault policy in 1992, and teaches courses on case law involving sexual assault and harassment.
“Temple University‘s Board of Trustees must act quickly to disassociate Temple University from Cosby by revoking Cosby’s Temple University Honorary Doctorate and by having his lawyer, the Chair of Temple University‘s Board of Trustees, Patrick O’Connor of Cozen O’Connor, step down,” Angel wrote in an article in a publication for Temple faculty.
Cosby has received close to 60 honorary degrees from academic institutions across the country. Some have rescinded his degree already, some say they are still considering it and others, such as Yale, say they simply do not rescind honorary degrees.
Fordham University was one of the first schools to rescind Cosby’s honorary degree and it was the first time the school had ever rescinded such a degree.
“That Mr. Cosby was willing to drug and rape women for his sexual gratification, and further damage those same women’s reputations and careers to obscure his guilt, hurt not only his victims, but all women, and is beyond the pale,” wrote Fordham’s president in making the decision.
One of Cosby’s attorneys, John Schmitt, a Fordham Law School alumnus, said the school was within its rights to do so but criticized the president’s statements.
Schmitt said the comments were “so irresponsible as to shock the conscience” and said it “grossly mischaracterizes both Mr. Cosby’s actions and his deposition testimony, in language more befitting a tabloid journal rather than a respected institution of higher learning.”
Locally, Wesleyan University and the University of Connecticut have given Cosby honorary degrees. Like Yale, Wesleyan also says it does not rescind honorary degrees. UConn said it has not made any decision on it yet.
At Maya Murphy, P.C., our personal injury attorneys are dedicated to achieving the best results for individuals and their family members and loved ones whose daily lives have been disrupted by injury, whether caused by a motor vehicle or pedestrian accident, a slip and fall, medical malpractice, a defective product, or otherwise. Our attorneys are not afraid to aggressively pursue and litigate cases and have extensive experience litigating personal injury matters in both state and federal courts, and always with regard to the unique circumstances of our client and the injury he or she has sustained.
Source: Christian Nolan. Universities Under Pressure to Revoke Degrees. CONN LAW TRIBUNE, May 23, 2016 at 10.
