Thursday, 4:30 PM
UMass weighs revoking Mugabe's honorary degree
By Globe Staff
Trustees at the University of Massachusetts today will consider revoking an honorary degree given more than 20 years ago to Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe accused of running a brutal and bloody regime.
Last month the Undergraduate Student Senate at UMass-Boston unanimously passed a request to retract the degree, which would be a first for the board of trustees.
UMass-Boston followed students at Michigan State University and the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, where officials are also weighing stripping honorary degrees bestowed upon Mugabe more than a decade ago, when he was revered as an outspoken opponent of apartheid in South Africa and a fighter for racial harmony in his country.
Mugabe, an 83-year-old former school teacher, has ruled Zimbabwe since it gained independence from Britain in 1980. His spokesman said in April that he won’t "lose sleep" over the controversy.
"Honorary degrees are exactly that, an unsolicited honor from the giver. If anything, those Western universities improved their international profile by associating themselves with the president," George Charamba, the presidential spokesman, told Zimbabwe’s official newspaper, The Herald.
"He does not lose sleep over threats," Charamba said.
Mugabe's critics accuse him of ruling with fear and cronyism. They chide him for seizing land from white commercial farmers and giving it to allies, while using the secret police to beat or kill opponents. His tenure also has been marred by Zimbabwe's slide from economic prosperity to a country ravaged by hunger and high unemployment.
Mugabe received an honorary doctorate of laws from UMass during a special convocation ceremony on the Amherst campus in October 1986. A program for that ceremony referred to Mugabe, then prime minister, as a champion of human rights.
"Your gentle firmness in the face of anger, and your intellectual approach to matters which inflame the emotions of others, are hallmarks of your quiet integrity," the program reads. "We salute you for your enduring and effective translation of a moral ethic into a strong, popular voice for freedom."
During his address at that ceremony, Mugabe spoke of the suffering and death of blacks under apartheid in South Africa and advocated for sanctions and other nonviolent means to overthrow the system of forced segregation and racial denigration, according to news accounts at the time. Makaziwe Mandela, daughter of former South African leader Nelson Mandela, gave Mugabe his doctoral hood.
