Harvard Students Launch Petition to Revoke Degrees of Trump Supporters in Government
“Harvard must revoke the degrees of alumni whose incendiary language and subversion of democratic processes–rooted in a history of white supremacist voter suppression–incited the violent insurrection on January 6.”
Lehigh University has already revoked an honorary degree from Trump, and Middlebury College is considering doing the same to Rudy Giuliani.
What is now happening at Harvard is not about honorary degrees.
Students and alumni are demanding that the school revoke earned degrees of people who worked in the Trump administration, and even people in other government positions who support him, such as Senator Ted Cruz.
Michael W. Chapman reports at CNS News:
Harvard Campaign Seeks to ‘Revoke Degrees’ of Trump Officials and Trump Allies
Graduate students and alumni of the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) have launched a campaign and petition to revoke the degrees earned by Harvard alumni who worked in the Trump administration and Harvard grads in Congress who support the president.
“Harvard must revoke the degrees of alumni whose incendiary language and subversion of democratic processes — rooted in a history of white supremacist voter suppression — incited the violent insurrection on January 6,” reads the petition, which is headlined “Revoke Their Degrees.”
Here’s an excerpt from the petition:
The campaign to subvert the outcome of the 2020 presidential election left five dead and nearly killed many more as armed, organized insurrectionists with Confederate flags and Nazi paraphernalia stormed the Capitol in search of members of Congress to kill or capture. Nationwide violence is expected in the weeks to come.
Is Harvard University prepared to take a stand for representative democracy and against violent white supremacy?
It’s no secret that over a dozen Harvard graduates worked hard to spread the disinformation and mistrust that created last Wednesday’s insurrection – from Representative Dan Crenshaw (HKS ‘17), who supported the December Texas lawsuit to invalidate the election, to Senator Ted Cruz (HLS ’97), one of the loudest claimants of fraud and a rare senator still objecting to the election certification after the violence at the Capitol, to White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany (HLS ’17), who dutifully denies the validity of the election.
Harvard must revoke the degrees of alumni whose incendiary language and subversion of democratic processes–rooted in a history of white supremacist voter suppression–incited the violent insurrection on January 6. This includes all who have used their platforms to deny the validity of the presidential election. They do not and should not represent a university committed to “strengthening democracy” and “the advancement of justice.”
Harvard students have started a petition to revoke the degree conferred on Trump admin folks and supporters (like Ted Cruz).
"A Harvard degree is a privilege, not a right."https://t.co/S28ALiMVeX
— Scott Greenfield (@ScottGreenfield) January 15, 2021
According to the FOX Business Network, the school is aware of the petition:
A spokesman for Harvard declined to comment other than to say the university is aware of the petition. McEnany, Cruz and Crenshaw had no immediate comment.
The petition began circulating on Wednesday and is said to be gaining some traction among both current and former students, FOX Business has learned.
“I was surprised how popular this petition is even among mid-career students” one student who says he won’t sign on to the effort and spoke on the condition of anonymity because he’s afraid of reprisals. “It’s one thing for 22-year-olds to sign onto something radical but another thing for 40-year-olds to buy into it.”
Now might be a good time to remind these students that the domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, a personal friend of President Obama, taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The fugitive cop-killer Assata Shakur is routinely celebrated by leftists on college campuses in the United States.
The anti-Israel terrorist Rasmea Odeh was often invited to speak at American colleges until she was deported.
America will not be lectured about Ted Cruz being a supporter of terrorism by students who attend a school that awarded a degree to Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber.
I don’t recall seeing a petition demanding the revocation of his degree.
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Elected republicans had one last chance to put up the legal roadblocks to all this foolishness. Instead, they let a bogus investigation flourish for three years and slow-walked the investigation of that, to the extent it was meaningless. Failed to secure the southern border, failed to protect legal voters, failed to root out corruption and rabble rousers in elective office. Now dems are back in power, the demons have been unleashed, when/where will it subside?
““I was surprised how popular this petition is even among mid-career students” one student who says he won’t sign on to the effort and spoke on the condition of anonymity because he’s afraid of reprisals.”
Petitioner: “Sign this petition to revoke Harvard degrees of people we do not like. Say, that’s a nice Harvard degree you have there. Shame if anything should happen to it.”
Stalin and Hitler could have used the services of people like this.
Makes you wonder who is supporting and funding this type of cancel culture.
The federal government is corrupt and most of the state governments are rapidly catching up to the feds. The Supreme Court has failed in its responsibility as an unbiased arbiter of law and now we have 20,000 troops surrounding our capitol.
to be fair… there are also a bunch of loons hopped up on Tick-Tock and parler outside the capital who want to come in and film facebook live posts and steal shit.
Isn’t revoking an earned degree kinda like putting toothpaste back into the tube?
Or impeaching a former President.
Or, beating a dead horse.
I’d say once given, it is not theirs to take back. They can ignore it, and never mention it, but it will always have been awarded.
Just as long as it isn’t a statue erected in your honor.
You have no rights that leftists feel bound to respect. None.
Only if ‘earned degree’ is being used. These guys obviously aren’t using their brains, so whats the harm in taking away something they probably bought in the first place.
I doubt that an earned degree can be revoked. Then there are Affirmative degrees, which far too often, are not earned.
Is Harvard University prepared to take a stand for representative democracy and against violent white supremacy?
Is Harvard ready to take a stand for bearing false witness against one’s neighbor? Is it ready to take a stand for pushing false memes and the politics of personal destruction?
Nope.
The Gramscian Marxists have triumphantly marched through the intitutions, and the institutions are all the worse for it.
Just click your heels three times and say
” There is no such thing as cancel culture,
There is no such thing as cancel culture,
There is no such thing as cancel culture “
We keep trying to explain: simply hearing something more than once doesn’t make it true. Has Don’s presidency debacle taught you nothing?
I weep for the future of America with children like this being allowed to make infantile, unconstitutional, immoral and ignorant demands like this.
I would never hire a Harvard grad.
Speaking of disinformation, every assertion in the excerpted manifesto is a defamatory falsehood.
College students are sssoooo stupid. A university can not revoke an earned degree, unless it can be shown that it was gained through cheating or other impropriety. The person who earned the degree PAID for it. A contract exists between the university and the recipient which guarantees the conferring of the degree upon satisfactory completion of the required study and a payment of all fees. You can not repossess an automobile which has been paid for and you can not do the same to an earned college degree.
Yeah, my first thought upon reading the story headline was huh, do you think they’ll at least give him a refund?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. One of the best life decisions I’ve ever made was dropping out of college, and going to a trade school.
You are so right. Retired now after finally reaching the retirement finish line of a really checkered “professional” career punctuated by several length stints of unemployment. I so regret both college and grad school, and wish I had stayed true to my family’s blue-collar roots. I would have been much happier that way.
You mean like Mike (aka Martin Luther) King who plagiarized portions of his dissertation at Boston U?
Or Theodore Kennedy?
“College students are sssoooo stupid. A university can not revoke an earned degree, unless it can be shown that it was gained through cheating or other impropriety.”
Why can they not revoke a degree? Is there some law of physics that prevents this? I would like everyone to stop saying THEY cannot do this, or THEY cannot do that. Unless it is contrary to the laws of physics they can, and even then, they may try.
All Harvard or any other university of college need do is declare a degree revoked and CANCEL the data. Erase all records of the student attending. If someone tries to verify attendance or graduation, they can then simply reply they have no record of such and such person ever attending their institution. It’s that easy.
Of course they can do this.
But oh no! They will be served! Good luck with that $100,000 expenditure, in Massachusetts, in front a judge who graduated from Harvard and remains in good standing with the school.
If Twitter and Facebook, as private institutions, can make all your data disappear, why can’t Harvard do they same, and airbrush you out of existence?
Perhaps there’s a business opportunity here: degree/tuition insurance.
And did Harvard stop to consider the risk they’d be taking by doing this? Who would want to attend if they could decide later on that you weren’t worthy of the degree after you earned it (and paid big money for it), or if you were expelled in your senior year just before graduation because you hurt the feewings of a female classmate and she felt “traumatized” or “uncomfortable” by your presence on campus?
My guess is that this petition will go nowhere, but unless a student attends Harvard for free, I’m not sure a degree conferring institution has grounds to revoke something that was paid for.
Do they teach anything in college anymore?
Do students study anything of merit anymore?
Does seem the students are the teachers these days
Back in October of 1989 I once joked about something happening if the Big One hit. A few hours later the big Loma Prieta quake delayed the World Series. I swore never to joke about that again.
During those same years I also joked sometimes about colleges asking for their degrees back. This took longer to bite back.
Those poor fools are going to be really shocked when they realize removing a piece of fancy paper does nothing to lessen intelligence of the previous owner of said fancy paper. It’s like thinking that the paint color affects the structural integrity of a house.
Unfortunately, there are many positions that require a college degree, such as being an officer in the military. No degree, no job. The personnel description says right their the candidate needs a college degree. The guy says he graduated from Harvard, but Harvard says they have no record of him. No job for cancelled dude.
But cancelled dude says, “No, look, here is my diploma. And look at this yearbook I have. There must be a mistake!”
Business goes, “Oh, you are one of THEM. Nope, no mistake. We cannot verify your degree. Good luck finding a job.”
This is not a harmless or stupid missive from a bunch or stupid college students. It is an aggressive and malicious act to at a minimum bully people with divergent points of view.
I seriously doubt that any military branch is going to fire an officer because some college changed their mind after he’s been commissioned, since his degree is already a matter of record.
Anyway, I doubt that the number of military officers who graduate from Harvard (and fit the “criteria” for having their degrees expunged) would fill a thimble.
If the university decides to say that he no longer has a degree, then he may need to keep heavy documentation to show that the earned the degree. But of course the next step would be a lawsuit with a demand for heavy punitive damages, a lawsuit targeting not just the institution but individuals in the administration.
One other point. Cancelling his law degree wouldn’t in any way affect a student’s BA/MA (unless, of course, they were all earned at the same school).
Can’t wait until the service academies do this.
Well that’s not Mao’ist at all.
For those interested… this book; releases this week.
Author: Yang Jisheng
Title: The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
I’m going to wait until an audio version comes out…hopefully not too long.
Horrible period of Chinese history.
But the CCP is now pushing another more sinister, subtle method of control: the social credit system.
And as evidenced by recent actions, it’s coming to YOUR neighborhood very, very soon.
Also, all these progs at Harvard who are basically totalitarians? I have read many times that “they will be surprised when they enter the job market.”
My contention is that WE will be surprised at what they are able to do and, also as evidenced by recent events, they are starting to do it.
Some encouraging news: “1984” is a top Amazon seller this month (if it is not used as a “how to”).
Follow how this works: first the wokerati persuade Harvard (well, ‘persuade’ is a strong word since many administrators want to do it) to revoke Senator Cruz’s undergraduate degree.
Then you go after his law degree — after all, if he lacks an undergraduate degree, he wouldn’t qualify to be admitted to law school in the first place. So you get that.
Now you’ve taken a person’s educational degrees away. From there you go after the professional licensing. Think of all the people with professional degrees — this would be a VERY effective way to destroy a person’s livelihood. A doctor speaks up about how the government handled COVID? Take away her degree. A lawyer speaks up about the government prosecuting people for ‘hate’ crimes? Take away his degree. And so on.
This is the first shot in a new front in the war — you can deplatform people on social media, and now you can deplatform people in their working lives.
Excellent points, excellent post.
Cruz is a Texan and I assume a member of the Texas Bar. I doubt they’d be all that anxious to kick him out.
It you are taking bets on that, I’ll take the other side of that.
Yeah, right. You internet gamblers are almost as brave as the internet warriors.
Yes, unfortunately so.
Revoking Cruz’s degree won’t do anything to Cruz. His real job, after all, is Senator not lawyer, and Senator has no educational requirements. Indeed, revoking degrees doesn’t hurt the high mucky mucks much at all. They are mostly in appointed or elected positions in government. The people it really hurts are the middle and upper middle class degree holders who now can’t ever leave their current jobs because the increasing credentialism of employers means not having a degree makes them unemployable in their current field.
If someone has earned a degree and paid for it, how do they think they can legitimately revoke it–it’s not a privilege at that point–I think it’s property
Call Matt makers who have been around legal insurrection for quite a while, Hlhave seen my comment before: Harvard is ceased to be a university, and has become more and more a punchline.
It is sad that Harvard has given rise to students so fundamentally uneducated that they would spout this invidious nonsense.
Harvard is just another college where the connections are more important than the degree itself. I’m afraid Cruz may loose his secret handshake privileges.
Harvard’s students, at least in ‘soft’ studies, are that way when they first arrive, Harvard doesn’t educate them, it validates their views.
“Harvard doesn’t educate them, it validates their views…”
Worse: it radicalizes them, to the point where we’ll see the killers they become, when they get police power.
Does that include a tuition refund? Just asking for a friend.?
The excerpt from the petition “The campaign to subvert the outcome of the 2020 presidential election…” needs to be modified and shortened considerably. A suggested revision:
“The campaign to subvert the outcome of the 2020 presidential election” … began years before the election and involved President Trump only to the extent that the results of the election ensured by any and all means undertaken that he lose the election. There, fixed it.
I hope that they cancel thousands of earned degrees because it’s going to make for a great class action lawsuit and hopefully put an end to many of these institutions of “learning”.
I thought you earned a degree? It’s not a privilege.
Take away their birthdays, too. And if they’re tall enough, revoke their height.
Lawdy lawdy lawyers! The school should be prepared to make tons of reparations to those who paid their due and legally earned those degrees. Send those children home to the kiddy table in their momma and daddys basement.
I doubt Harvard will proceed with this, and I am no fan of Harvard (Boston College grad). If they did something this stupid, their value will drop like a stone.
Don’t be upset by such idiocy. These people are making fools of themselves and if anything we should get their names, and record their behavior.
When the Dems create enough devastation, we will win and can then apply their own rules to them. Given their present behavior, allowing them to play any role in government is a horrible concept.
In my perfect world, after Gibsons wins and gets the settlement check from Oberlin, I would like to see some of that money set aside to go after the individual students at the protests. At say $5K a pop for starters, a paltry $1.5M could make a world of hurt for those 300 or so students who participated. Paying back that college loan would then become the least of their problems, just sayin. 300 students hit with $150K suits would be my version of a forward-based double-down. Even more fun if one could get a few of the students to flip on their comrades. I know employers really like getting letters stating that an employee may be getting their wages garnished in the near future. Ditto mortgage providers.
Well, you have to realize that Harvard Students are mostly Children.
Children of Democrats…
Seems that colleges and universities revoke honorary degrees all the time. Lehigh University foolishly revoking Trump’s honorary degree being the latest example of this idiocy. It’s unfathomable to me how stupid it is to revoke an honor from a sitting US President. How can anything good possibly come out of that?
Anyway, is not an honorary degree granted in consideration for services rendered (e.g. graduation speech)?
How will this affect revoking an “earned” degree? Isn’t it, so to speak, only a matter of degree? Confiscatory tuition payments and actual academic work as consideration rather than a mere speech–but in principle, is it not the same kind of thing?
My gut feeling is that revoking earned degrees WILL happen and will happen very soon. As soon as one Ivy League university does it, it all the universities and colleges will start doing it. It will happen without regard to legality, good business practices, or ethics. Anything goes at elite liberal colleges–they are entirely disconnected from reality, financial or otherwise. This may have the effect of pushing students into state universities, where they presumably have more legal protection.
Geez does that mean a fellow can’t say on his resume that he has a bachelors in BS from Harvard? Somehow I don’t think these little twits understand that it’s awful hard to have an eraser all over the countryside.
Of course what does Syracuse University Law School when virtual anchor clanker Joe Biden claims he graduated “at the top of the class” from Syracuse?
Syracuse does what Occidental did for Obama: block access to his transcripts so you can’t prove he’s lying about what’s in them.
Democrat students at Harvard should have their acceptance contracts repealed. Let Harvard keep all the tuition money they’ve spent and all the millions of dollars daddies tucked into Harvard applications. Sound fair?
On this day we celebrate the man who made the statement “The Truth will set you Free!” On this day Mr. Trump, release all of the Obama/Biden election interference as well as the Ukraine issues for We the People to evaluate.
Bwahahahahaha. The Harvard petitioners must be hallucinating on LSD because there were no Confederate flags and Nazis. Once a person has worked hard to earn their degree from Harvard, their degree can’t be revoked on allegations of their right to free speech. After all, these idiot petitioners have a right to petition and be heard by the Harvard administration because of their 1st Amendment Rights, which they are turning into a farce to benefit their cancel culture. So who has the right to heard??? Everyone has that right because of their inherent 1st Amendment Rights within our great Constitution.