My heart paused when I saw the envelope from Yale. I didn’t imagine that it contained a letter commending my clever, if fantastical, “hermeneutical” reading of your first letter.
I accept all that you say and thank you for the honor you do me by the gracious, respectful way you say it. I apologize for characterizing the degree to Bush as motivated by money.
My fantasy that there couldn’t be many at Yale who admire or approve of Bush dies hard. I think now that I must have preferred to believe that the degree was about money than to believe that a majority of your selection committee believed Bush deserved the honor. It seems that I made the (untested) assumption that a “Yale education” should enable a person to perceive at least some of the reality whose shadows are cast on the cave wall (to use a metaphor I learned freshman year in Directed Studies Philosophy I). A Yale education should facilitate truth’s coming out—even political truth.
But perhaps it’s asking too much to expect a university education to improve its students’ political views. Perhaps I’m as likely to have been immune to improvement as George W. Bush seems to have been. And, as you pointed out about big donors’ coming from either end of the political spectrum, I’m sure that liberals can come to Yale with as much expectation of entitlement as the sons of Prescott Bush can.
Nevertheless, I believe that Bush was so far from deserving the degree that in the years to come Yale alumni familiar with Bush’s “accomplishments” will be as amazed as I was chagrined and embarrassed that in the year 2001 our alma mater conferred such an honor on such a man.
If we take seriously our patriotic duty as citizens to defend the Constitution of the United States of America, we cannot support a president who has repeatedly violated it, with impunity. Yale might have a patriotic duty to take back that degree. Do the bylaws of the committee that decides honorary degrees have a provision for stripping an honoree of his degree? Since an honorary degree is by definition not earned, it would seem to be no violation of parliamentary procedure to entertain such a motion. Even if Bush could not be forced to give back his certificate, the passage of such a motion could “send a message” that Yale now regrets its 2001 action and judges itself patriotically bound to act symbolically in defense of the Constitution.
Would you be willing to forward this suggestion to some of those who voted against a degree’s going to Bush in the first place?
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