Bill Cosby
The University of Maryland has put together an impressive list of commencement speakers over the years. The roster of people who have addressed Terrapin graduates is a veritable who’s-who of political, cultural, scientific and sporting leaders.
The last few decades have brought to campus a former CIA director (Leon Panetta, 2009), baseball’s Iron Man (Cal Ripken Jr., 2013), a Google co-founder and university alumnus (Sergey Brin, 2003) and a U.S. secretary of state (Madeleine Albright, 1998). This isn’t a JV list of commencement speakers.
But there’s also Bill Cosby.
Cosby surely seemed like a good idea when he spoke to university graduates in 1992. When he addressed a crowd here that May, it wasn’t unusual or off-putting that the university furnished Cosby with an honorary degree, as it does all commencement speakers. After all, Cosby was one of the country’s preeminent comedians and cultural and racial voices. He was a hot ticket, and university administrators must have been tickled to net him for a commencement address.
Except now dozens of women have accused Cosby of rape, and he’s admitted to acquiring drugs in the past with the intent of supplying them to women he wanted to have sex with. (Sex that he insists was purely consensual.)
Whether Cosby is guilty of sexual assault in legal terms or not, this is problematic for the university. The university’s own sexual misconduct policy says it’s definitely not OK to have sex with an incapacitated party. Incapacitation, by the university’s and any other modern definition, can result from “drugs, medication or other substances used to facilitate sexual misconduct.”
So, whether Cosby was giving women drugs with or without their consent, he was directly violating what now makes up this university’s sexual misconduct policy if the many accusations that he had sex with women while they were incapacitated are true.
If Cosby did on this campus as a student today what he’s now been accused of doing to women multiple times in his past, he would be subject to expulsion by the Office of Student Conduct for sexual assault. That’s whether the criminal justice system would have enough evidence to charge Cosby or not. Either way, he’d be kicked out of school here.
Cosby has made the speaking rounds at American universities, and he’s collected honorary degrees at a lot of them. The New York Times wrote last week about the dilemma these schools — Maryland among them — are now facing. The Times reports Cosby has collected at least 57 honorary degrees since 1985, meaning he’s gotten one of the highest academic honors at about 56 more universities than you have.
“I like to see these fresh, wet faces going out into the world,” Cosby told The Times in 1998, which now sounds harrowing against the backdrop of Cosby’s apparent tastes.
Crystal Brown, a university spokeswoman, confirmed Cosby still has an honorary degree, and she wasn’t aware of any plans to take it from him.
So, Cosby still has his University of Maryland honor, and it’s not going away — at least not right now.
