Monday, March 13, 2006
You can tell a lot about a group's values by the honors they choose to bestow, and the people they choose to bestow them upon. For instance, we have the formerly ruling Fatah bestowing honorary citizenship to a pair of vicious murderers...
It's rather unsurprising that America's colleges are rife with some very dubious rewards -- disturbing and entertaining at the same time...John Leo tracks down a bunch (not all in the schools, just most). Here's a snip of a few: America is Rife With Morally Dubious Awards
- Bard College notoriously maintains a chair in social studies named for Alger Hiss, the communist spy, traitor and perjurer. This is perhaps the stupidest honor given anywhere in America. The University of Washington's Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies is named for the late and powerful labor leader, who was a communist, a perjurer and an apologist for Stalin.
- Last year the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York announced a new scholarship named for Ho Chi Minh and another honoring Joanne Chesimard, the former Black Panther and convicted murderer of a New Jersey police officer. Both scholarships were quickly renamed after protests.
- Stanford Law School paid Lynne Stewart, the lawyer who had been indicted for aiding Islamic terrorists, to speak and mentor students at a conference. After loud complaints, the school withdrew the word "mentor" from her conference title, but let her conduct mentoring and deliver her lecture anyway. Since then, she has been convicted on all five counts of conspiring to aid terrorists and lying to the government.
(via this link-laden post at Atlas's -- lots more there, btw)
Here's something closer to home, from USA Today, Sept 12, 2001;
"In 1994, one of his brothers, Sheik Bakr Mohammed bin Laden, made a large donation to Harvard Law School to fund visiting scholars to do research in Islamic legal studies.
Harvard Law spokesman Michael Armini would not disclose the amount of the gift, but typically it takes about $1 million to establish a research fellowship. The sheik established a second scholarship at the Harvard School of Design.
Harvard officials were quick to distance the school from Osama bin Laden, emphasizing that he has no role in the scholarship programs."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/12/binladen-boston.htm
Whether those fellowships still exist, I don't know.
Then of course there's the Edward Said Chair in Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia, named for a guy who's academic work was in literature and who created mostly polemics in the stated field of the chair.