Comments on: Wanna Protest Al Gore?

By: Suggested chant: ‘One, two, three, four, your documentary was such a bore. Five, six, seven, eight, your Nobel Prize don’t hold no weight.’ : Post Politics: Political News and Views in Tennessee

Thu, 06 May 2010 14:03:38 +0000

[...] Royer with the deets of UT protest of the former vice-president going down this [...]

By: adrienne

adrienne — Tue, 04 May 2010 18:04:47 +0000

Agreed that the issue of honorary degrees should be explored more. However, I already wrote about that in my previous posts on my objections.

Honorary degrees are new to the UT system. They have previously only given away two–Howard Baker and Dolly Parton. Both are committed to the State of Tennessee and are tremendous philanthropists. As such, those are the standards that the University established. Al Gore meets neither.

By: Brando

Brando — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:27:51 +0000

There’s certainly a lot of “quid pro quo” involved in university philanthropy and honorary degrees, and a general protest against that system itself is fine as it is. But this particular case you point to doesn’t seem any more egregious than most. Famous, rich and influential people constantly get degrees from colleges they have no connection to–at least Gore has SOME Tennessee connections (losing his home state was pathetic, but does that really mean he lost all connection to the state?). I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama or Bush got honorary degrees from colleges they’d never even visited before.

But this raises another broader question–do honorary degrees cheapen the concept of the earned degree? (and let’s not even get into grade inflation, etc.!) What sort of contortions should schools be allowed to do in order to secure funding or “prestige”? Those are issues worthy of a broader protest.

By: adrienne

adrienne — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:00:23 +0000

Brando, this post was meant to serve as an update. I went into my reasons for opposing Al Gore previously.

Essentially, the Gore family has had very little to do with the UT system. Unlike many states, we have numerous university systems, and the Gore family has historically been connected with Vanderbilt.

Also factor in that Gore is a nominal Tennessean. His family maintains a farm there, but he actually grew up in DC. He couldn’t even win his “homestate” when he ran for president. The people of Tennessee could really care less about him. This is UT’s attempt to get on the global warming bandwagon and get a piece of the Gore family pie. Gore simultaneously created a crisis and managed to profit from it.

There could be some underhanded work here. Just three years ago, Gore endowed a climatology chair at UT. Now he’s getting an honorary doctorate. University philanthropy is notoriously dirty.

By: Brando

Brando — Tue, 04 May 2010 16:53:11 +0000

While I’m no fan of Al Gore, I’m not really seeing the justification for punishing UT for giving him an honorary degree. Wherever you stand with his politics, he was a longtime Senator, VP and Presidential candidate, and certainly one of the more famous Tennesseans of the past fifty years. Would it be so egregious for University of Indiana to grant an honorary degree to Dan Quayle?

Had this been a genuinely odious character, such as Al Sharpton, I’d be in agreement. But Gore, for his faults, is hardly a villain.