1. https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/columbia-university-pro...
The perpetrator should be sued for damages which is the normal thing to happen. Withdrawing properly received credentials opens the door to yet another extra-judicial punishment and we already have too many of those.
(EDIT) I've since googled around a bit and am surprised that there does seem to be a degree of discretion available to the university to revoke degrees that I was unaware of. I had always considered degrees to be like an affidavit, a statement of a fact as the institution understands it. There are plenty of horrible people who have done heinous things and I've never heard of their degrees being taken away. Perhaps one difference here is that the behavior under question was during their undergrad.
This one has a significant complication of parallel legal action. They seized and vandalized a building. They’ve been reviewing evidence and building cases for a long time.
These things take time.
Columbia did none of the things in category (2). I know it’s 2025 and we have to pretend that this apparently corrupt thing is innocent, even while the folks involved make no effort to defend it. But it isn’t innocent, and everyone involved knows what’s going on.
There is no point in giving into threats if the other party is still going to follow through regardless. I think the best argument against this being due to political pressure from trump is it doesn't seem effective in getting rid of that pressure. If trump is the thing they care about here, why would they bother if trump is going to do trump things regardless.
The Trump administration is withholding funding and simultaneously making a series of explicit (and completely inappropriate) demands that it wishes Columbia to comply with. I assume what we're watching is a kind of "negotiation" period in which Columbia either does or does not do various things, and then over time the Trump administration decides whether to relent or punish them further. There is no real pressure on the administration to just stop.
One of the explicit demands the administration made was for Columbia to disband the University Judicial Board (the exact group that handed down these decisions) presumably because they felt that it would not sufficiently punish the protesters. Coincidentally, around the same time this happened, the board "independently" decided to punish the protesters quite severely.
I don’t understand why this is even an option? So the degree is never truly owned by the recipient then if it can be withdrawn/ revoked? Just another reason not to invest time and money into it.
No it’s not. Not unless you plan on taking over campus buildings and vandalizing them, I guess.
The degree isn’t some unrevocable item that you own. It’s an endorsement from the university. There are contractual agreements involved and it doesn’t take much imagination to think of how taking over a campus building and vandalizing it (while encouraging current students to join you) is grounds for them to cancel the degree.
You can come up with whatever justification you want, but this action is unprecedented and clearly a politically motivated punishment.
It is unusual, but the situation is unusual. I think calling it unprecedented is a bit much. Its plausible it could be politically motivated, but it seems equally plausible that the school is pissed that they now have to find thousands in the budget to repair the damage done. Causing tens of thousands of dollars in damages is a plausible reason for the school to be mad.
I agree 100% that people like Ekrem İmamoğlu is a totally different situation. That was the thing i was trying to argue.
In any case Columbia had ample time to address it's students before granting them diplomas - no facts have changed between them and now, nor have any new facts been made public. It's only turning heel because of political pressure by the President of the United States.
This is what I find so surprising. Having contractual stipulations I would need to abide by AFTER getting my degree for fear of revocation is nonsense to me, gross even. I don’t care if you’re the Unabomber. It’s silly for a university to be policing that. I guess I’m naive.
To be clear, so there’s no temptation to move the goal posts, I’m talking about a degree “already earned and received”.
The conduct in question happened pre-degree even if the punishment was after. I think that is a pretty important distinction.
most contracts cover conduct during the contract even if it only comes to light after the end of the contract, so that wouldn't be so unusual.
What annoys me is that revocation is even an option at all. I think this scenario is such an edge case that it really doesn't need an exception, and if supporting it means having the power to revoke a degree, then in my mind it's a lever for abuse and not something we'd want to normalize. It seems, to me at least, like a petty abuse of power that they shouldn't even have.
The article says Columbia “temporarily revoked the diplomas of some students.” I imagine this is what’s going on.
That’s certainly a very different situation than simply being a protestor. I understand that everyone has different definitions of what protest means, but regardless it’s not a free pass to escape the consequences of your actions.
If any current or former students had taken over a campus building, locked others out of using it, and damaged it they’d probably end up in jail with a long list of charges. Having their degrees “temporarily revoked” seems like a massive slap on the wrist for the situation, not some dystopian unfair outcome.
Nope. It is the same. Twisting arms to remove opposing political views. If they've committed crimes then there are laws to deal with it.
When a future employer has degree requirements, the university will say "no, he has no degree from here" when someone calls to check, closing off all sorts of jobs.
If someone is doing a background check, the "claims a fancy degree but the school denies it" line is not going to look good.
Etc.
Sure the person still has the education, but they haven't got the right credentials in a verifiable way.
It's not the paper.
The degree is simply the formal proof. If a degree is revoked, that’s a secondary signal that the studies were marked as completed at one time but something later happened that was so egregious that the university felt the need to rescind any endorsements.
Discovery of rampant cheating to achieve graduation would do it. Taking over a campus building and vandalizing it seems like a reasonable thing to cause the university to want to rescind their endorsement of you.
I take it you are unfamiliar with what happened at Columbia University in 1968, and in particular how the university feels about it now.
In some places, potential employers call the university to verify that you have the degree you claimed to prevent fraud. If so, the university can simply tell them the degree had been revoked thus blocking you from a job offer if it requires it.
The people answering that phone or email are low-level admin staff far removed from those who decided to revoke the degree – I don’t know whether they have access to the reasoning or justification behind the revocation.
> Without justification, couldn't the degree holder sue the institution for some sort of defamation?
I honestly hope so – I’m quite against being able to revoke a degree due to other reasons than plain fraud (like plagiarism or fabrication). But I don’t know the laws well enough to answer.
1. Why now (for Columbia)?
2. Why now (for Turkey)?
The fact that it's in the realm of possibility that the answer is the same for both (political expedience) is a stain on America/Columbia U.
The article says there were over 40 people involved and they’ve been building cases against each of them.
I don’t think there’s a conspiracy here. These things are a lot of work, involve a lot of lawyers, and take a lot of time. It’s only been a few months.
Not so long ago it wasn't enough for justice to be done, but it has to be seen to be done.
If I murder someone during my diploma, get the diploma, and then get caught, will the diploma be taken away? How does that make sense?
Murdering a professor doesn't change that fact, so from a strict logical standpoint it should not be affected.
That said, I don't really have a problem if they do.
In that sense this is not revoking a diploma, it's just applying the punishment for what they did before they graduated.
And while obviously Columbia's actions are politically motivated, I still don't think it's remotely comparable with what's happening in Turkey. The New York protestors really are being punished for what they did, and not to prevent them from running for election (which most of them couldn't do anyway, as you cannot do that on a visa, I don't think even a green card lets you hold public office)
Ok, but why should it?
The diploma doesn't certify that you're a pleasant person, have good morals or follow the law. It means that you passed some exams and are expected to have some competency in your subject. The only reason to doubt that this is the case after already giving someone a diploma is cheating, which means they didn't actually pass the exams. Other misconduct during working on the diploma has nothing to do with the qualifications for the diploma.
For that purpose it makes 100% sense that good behavior is a requirement of getting a diploma.
That's the reason the Turkey situation is what it is (of course Erdogan has already destroyed public institutions in Turkey, during the Erdogan-orchestrated "coup" against Erdogan). There, it's being used as an electoral weapon, and that's not what's happening in the US.
The American situation is different, but some parts remain. A diploma is not meant to just prove knowledge, it is meant to prove that you can be trusted to (help) organize a particular part of society, and that includes things like behavior standards. A lot of this, such as loyalty oaths (as in multiple, most famously the hippocratic oath, but certainly not just that one), the requirement to be accepted by currently important public servants (e.g. there was a time in Europe that to pass lawyers needed to present themselves to a judge from the supreme court and survive whatever test he wanted). There were globally mandated subjects, as in for every university degree (philosophy, state structure, religion, law, rhetoric). Those were not just mandated courses you had to take, you had to pass. 100% on everything, but fail religion? Tough, no diploma (one famous example of that was Einstein, who made it a sport to fail religion class, and was as an exception granted a diploma anyway)
Lots of felons keep their degree.
In this case, no one was murdered. The crime is more like trespassing. Should we take degrees of people who get caught dealing drugs? Insider trading? Pirating movies?
Do you think this punishment represents a consistent policy of the university, or was it applied under government pressure?
What if you murder someone off campus? Is the moral issue the location the murder occurred?
To be precise, it sounds like they’ve been revoked until damages are paid back. This is no different from a diploma being revoked because your last tuition cheque bounced.
Allright, I'll bite the hook.
1. Precisely what categories of crimes do you think degrees should be revoked for?
2. Should it be automatic, or up to the whims of a political appointee?
2.1 If it's the latter, is that really the society you want to live in? Why?
It's easy to find a reason to shit on people you dislike. It's a lot harder to find a principled reason to do so, that can stand up to basic scrutiny.
(Of course, the current solution to this quandary is to gleefully abandon any principles.)