Honorary degrees for celebrities: Persona, Scandal, and the case of Bill Cosby

ABSTRACT

The conferring of an honorary degree on an entertainment celebrity has become an increasingly regular and routine practice, a symptom of how readily the value and capital accumulated in entertainment industries can be converted into value in another field like academia. In this paper, we argue that the celebrity persona is a crucial factor in easing what Driessens has called ‘the exchange rate’ of such movements across fields of activity. As a case study, we turn to Bill Cosby, a (once) popular entertainer who, as the recipient of no less than 71 honorary degrees over three decades, was a long-time favourite on the American Commencement circuit. Through Cosby’s prolific career and equally prolific honours, we can trace the role of persona in creating forms of value that academic institutions have found useful. Cosby’s case is instructive because his recent disgrace highlights the mutability of celebrity personas and how the practices of conferring and rescinding honorary degrees work to absorb and affirm public personas.

KEYWORDS:

• Bill Cosby
• honorary degrees
• Persona
• Scandal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Statistical data on Cosby’s honorary degrees include only confirmed reports of degrees awarded as reported by media or public records. It is possible there are additional honorary degrees unaccounted for here.

2. At least one supervisor was not pleased with how meetings were controlled by Cosby and it has been contended that large parts of the thesis were written by writers from the television programs (Dyson 2005 ch., p. 2). Cosby’s dissertation, ‘An Integration of the Visual Media via Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids into the Elementary School Curriculum as a Teaching Aid and Vehicle to Achieve Increased Learning,’ provided some background around the disconnection of education from African Americans and linked Cosby’s series to two educationally produced programs from the Children’s Television Workshop – The Electric Light Company, a program aimed at improving literacy among 6 to 9-year-olds and starring Cosby in its first of three seasons, and Sesame Street.

3. In 1954, the US Supreme Court ruled that the ‘separate but equal’ schools for black and for white children were unconstitutional, paving the way for educational reforms and the civil rights movement (The Leadership Conference 2017).

4. Private institutions were far more likely to rescind both pre-verdict (49%) and post-verdict (77.5%), but post-verdict there was a steep and rapid increase of public instructions rescinding (18% pre-verdict to 63% post-verdict). Initially, no HBCU rescinded, but post-verdict three institutions have rescinded, and one other has, at time of writing, brought the subject under active discussion. It should be noted that one HBCU closed in 2013 and would have been unable to take action.

5. Almost identical phrasing was used by administrators and public relations staff from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, University of Notre Dame, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the College of William and Mary (Ivie 2015, Kapsidelis 2015). After the verdict, many of these institutions revised their stance, implicitly or explicitly invoking the significance of the verdict in this change.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katja Lee

Katja Lee has just completed a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, BC) and teaches at the University of Western Australia (Perth, WA). She has recently co-edited two collections, Contemporary Publics (2016) and Celebrity Cultures in Canada (2016), and is writing a book on the history and development of the celebrity autobiography across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

P. David Marshall

P. David Marshall is a research professor and holds a personal chair in new media, communication and cultural studies at Deakin University. His most recent books include Contemporary Publics (2016), Celebrity Persona Pandemic (2016), A Companion to Celebrity (2016), Advertising and Promotional Culture: Case Histories (2018), and Persona Studies: An Introduction (2019).