Zimbabwean President Mugabe Faces Rebukes, Retraction of Honorary Degrees

By Ibram Rogers

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe — once honored as one of the world’s leading human rights activists by universities in the United States and England — is now being reprimanded in those countries as one of the world’s worst human rights villains.

On June 6, the Edinburgh University of Scotland decided to withdraw the honorary degree it had awarded Mugabe in 1984. On June 21, University of Massachusetts trustees voted not to strip Mugabe of his degree, but to officially rebuke him and to consider creating a process for revoking honorary degrees.

At Michigan State University, which awarded an honorary degree to Mugabe in 1990, there have been calls to revoke Mugabe’s degree. MSU’s office of the vice president for research and graduate studies, which houses the honorary degree committee, is looking into “why it was given in the first place, and was it given for the right reasons,” says Terry Denbow, a university spokesperson, adding that the office does not have a timetable for reaching a decision.

In addition, MSU has never revoked an honorary degree, and there is no formal process for doing so, Denbow says. Neither has UMass. This is the first time in the 425-year history of Edinburgh that it has stripped somebody of one.

The 83-year-old Mugabe, who has presided over Zimbabwe since it gained its independence from Great Britain in 1980, has not lost any sleep over the actions of the three universities, his spokesman told
The Herald, a Zimbabwean newspaper.

“Honorary degrees are exactly that, an unsolicited honor from the giver,” George Charamba says. “If anything, those Western universities improved their international profile by associating themselves with
the president.”

Mugabe has faced mounting criticism in recent years as Zimbabwe’s once thriving economy has descended into economic hardship. Once considered the breadbasket of southern Africa, more than 2.1 million people in the country are expected to face food shortages by the third quarter of this year, according to a report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Mugabe has also been assailed for his policy of seizing land from White farmers and redistributing it among landless Blacks. But some Mugabe supporters argue that the country’s economic deterioration is a result of American and British foreign policies.