Obama, ASU, and ASU's Mistake

To borrow from Elizabeth Browning, How do I love President Obama? Let me count the ways. As this is only a blog, I will focus on two aspects of who President Obama is with the Arizona State University’s decision to invite him as a speaker but not confer on him an honorary degree as background. First, he is the President. Hmmm. I think that Huffington Post’s coverage of this ordeal has been pretty sound and fair up to this point. I do not intend to rehash President Obama’s many accomplishments including his first historical appointment as editor of the Harvard Law Review, his days teaching some of the greatest lawyers practicing today at the University of Chicago Law School, his community leader days in South Side Chicago, and the rest of the activities that surely populate that amazing resume. But it goes without saying that he is the President of the United States. Second, he, following Marshall Gans’ philosophy and style of community engagement both at the local and national level, effectively made the lives of pockets of the population better while getting them involved in the democratic process. Some may say that these accomplishments and apparently those not mentioned are too local, too small, too insignificant to receive an honorary degree for “works of merit.” Hogwash. Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone: is that too local? Joe Klein’s leadership in New York? Too Local? I think not.

With that said, what really annoys me about the process is the way that ASU is handling it since Sneed broke the story, effectively announcing to the world that President Obama will not receive the honorary degree from ASU. I know how the conferring honorary degrees work. They are pretty much decided at the beginning of the year by a selected committee of students, faculty, and administrators. And for whatever reason, ASU did not choose Barack Obama. Ok. But let’s think about how they are basically saying now, to save face, let’s give him one anyway. In my opinion, if your initial decision was to not give this amazing individual an honorary degree, stand by that decision. For, to basically say, “Oops, we dropped the ball” a month before graduation and after saying he was too inexperienced, (if this is true I have no hope of ever receiving an honorary degree even with the real ones I have and trying to get), is wrong, unethical, wrong, and degrading. Did I mention wrong? To me, that degree, if President Obama is to accept it, has been sullied and now is worth less than what an honorary degree is worth normally.

Let’s think about it. The reports are now saying that University President Crow is now forcing a degree for Obama through causing people to place a horrible preposition phrase that would cause me to put that honoris cosa back on the shelf: after all. Barack Obama is not an after all. Nothing he has done deserves such a phrase behind it. It is adding insult to injury, not necessarily to Obama but to their institution and the entire process as a whole. Additionally, ASU has effectively disgraced the process of conferring honorary degrees in my mind; it should be a group decision from the beginning to the end and the president ought not to force that decision on others, no matter how right he may be.

This is, in no way, a show of President Obama’s character or his ability to serve. However, this incident does show how we still have a way to go in coming to grips with what it means to have Barack Obama as the President of the United States. No I am not talking about his race. I speak to the assumed resume that a president should have and how Obama has literally started to redefine what that resume should look like. Thankfully, this is not a nationwide thing. I know that my alma mater would offer (or already has) offered President Obama an honorary degree. Notre Dame seems to be thinking on the same page. Other will surely follow. Michele, the girls, grandma, and, of course, Barack should plan to be visiting colleges and universities in May and June for some years to come because I am positive other schools will not make the same mistake that ASU did, and worse, is doing.