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Michigan State University Refuses to Revoke Mugabe’s Honorary Degree

Kyle Bristow - 3/6/2008

Michigan State University is known for a lot of things. It has a good basketball team, a decent football team, and its students—the Spartans—riot in the streets every few years or so. (Riots have occurred in 1997, 1998, 1999, and most recently, on April 2, 2005.) What is not widely known is that MSU gave in 1990 an honorary degree in law to the dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, when he spoke at the university. Honorary degrees are not earned through coursework; they are given to people by the university as a symbolic trophy to honor their achievements in life.

It could be worse. MSU could have given an honorary degree to Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, or Adolf Hitler, but after checking the university website, it seems that Robert Mugabe is the only dictator whom has been honored by the state-funded university to date.

How bad is Mugabe?

Every year, Parade magazine, a periodical that is distributed in over 400 newspapers every Sunday, releases a list of the world’s top ten worst dictators. This year Mugabe was rated the sixth worst dictator. The article states about Mugabe’s leadership that:

Zimbabwe’s economy went from bad to worse last year. Inflation exploded to more than 50,000%, unemployment reached 80%, and food supplies continued to dwindle. One-quarter of the country’s population has fled. Nevertheless, Mugabe is running for a sixth term. The opposition is trying to unite, but police arrested and beat 50 opposition leaders last March.

I am still the Hitler of the time. This Hitler has only one objective, justice for his own people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people, and their right to their resources. If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold.

Luke Zunga, an official of the Zimbabwean Diaspora Forum, detailed the atrocities of the Mugabe regime in his book, Farm Invasions in Zimbabwe: Is Zimbabwe a Democracy?. From his book:

Thousands of men and women, children and elderly, were rounded up into interrogation camps where they were held for weeks. People died in these torture camps... Digging graves was a daily routine for the captives. Some of the dead were loaded into trucks to be dumped in local mine shafts. At [one] police camp... people were held in open cages spattered with blood and human waste from previous detainees. They were exposed to the wind, rain, and sun while in adjacent interrogation cells the screams and groans of those being tortured could be heard. It was a replication of the colonial regimes, but perpetrated at a level much worse, by a black government headed by Robert Mugabe.

In an interview with The Big Green, an online newspaper run by MSU students, MSU University Relations Vice President Terry Denbow said, “There is a long list of honorary degree recipients and not one has been revoked... In fact, I don't know of any university which has revoked a degree.”

According to the Edinburgh University Student Association, in June of 2007 Edinburgh University revoked its honorary degree that it had bestowed upon Mugabe in 1984. It is unlikely that MSU will follow suit if the administrators remain as resolute as they currently are on the issue. Only time will tell if the MSU officials will eventually give in to the demands of those who think that honoring a tyrant may not be the best thing to do.