I think in such situations it can be withheld but not withdrawn, it's pretty common for universities to hold back credentials until debts are paid. But once it's been given I think the only scenario which it can be withdrawn is if it was given under fraudulent circumstances. Like a newspaper retraction, it can only be retracted if the original statement was found to be false.
The perpetrator should be sued for damages which is the normal thing to happen. Withdrawing properly received credentials opens the door to yet another extra-judicial punishment and we already have too many of those.
(EDIT)
I've since googled around a bit and am surprised that there does seem to be a degree of discretion available to the university to revoke degrees that I was unaware of. I had always considered degrees to be like an affidavit, a statement of a fact as the institution understands it. There are plenty of horrible people who have done heinous things and I've never heard of their degrees being taken away. Perhaps one difference here is that the behavior under question was during their undergrad.
> Withdrawing properly received credentials opens the door to yet another extra-judicial punishment and we already have too many of those.
I don’t understand why this is even an option? So the degree is never truly owned by the recipient then if it can be withdrawn/ revoked? Just another reason not to invest time and money into it.
> Just another reason not to invest time and money into it.
No it’s not. Not unless you plan on taking over campus buildings and vandalizing them, I guess.
The degree isn’t some unrevocable item that you own. It’s an endorsement from the university. There are contractual agreements involved and it doesn’t take much imagination to think of how taking over a campus building and vandalizing it (while encouraging current students to join you) is grounds for them to cancel the degree.
> The degree isn’t some unrevocable item that you own.
This is what I find so surprising. Having contractual stipulations I would need to abide by AFTER getting my degree for fear of revocation is nonsense to me, gross even. I don’t care if you’re the Unabomber. It’s silly for a university to be policing that. I guess I’m naive.
To be clear, so there’s no temptation to move the goal posts, I’m talking about a degree “already earned and received”.
Sure I hear you. I agree that this distinction matters.
What annoys me is that revocation is even an option at all. I think this scenario is such an edge case that it really doesn't need an exception, and if supporting it means having the power to revoke a degree, then in my mind it's a lever for abuse and not something we'd want to normalize. It seems, to me at least, like a petty abuse of power that they shouldn't even have.
Eh, I attended a conservative Christian college and there was a pretty strict religious code of conduct students were required to abide by. I would find it pretty disturbing for the school to retroactively rescind my engineering degree due to my having drunk underage or being an atheist.
You can come up with whatever justification you want, but this action is unprecedented and clearly a politically motivated punishment.
My high school wouldn't let you graduate if you had unpaid library fines, i can't imagine what they would do if you caused tens of thousands of dollars in damage. I agree rescinding post-granting degree is weird but we are still talking about behaviour that happened while they were students and that happened relatively recently (such that disciplinary procedures could have realistically started while they were still students).
It is unusual, but the situation is unusual. I think calling it unprecedented is a bit much. Its plausible it could be politically motivated, but it seems equally plausible that the school is pissed that they now have to find thousands in the budget to repair the damage done. Causing tens of thousands of dollars in damages is a plausible reason for the school to be mad.
I think you're claiming the Ekrem İmamoğlu case is completely different, I don't think that's what anyone else is saying.
In any case Columbia had ample time to address it's students before granting them diplomas - no facts have changed between them and now, nor have any new facts been made public. It's only turning heel because of political pressure by the President of the United States.
I actually tend to agree with this (once its given i think morally its too late to take it away, except maybe if they cheated). I still think its a totally different situation than the turkey one though.
They are both situations in which a University was politically pressured by the government to revoke degrees for political purposes. The difference is just the specific goals of the government doing the pressuring. You don’t think Columbia just coincidentally decided to take this action months after the fact, after having its funding pulled by the US administration, do you?
I don't agree with politically pressuring organizations but it could just as easily be politically motivated to not enforce established rules on criminal behaviour.
This is honestly something very strange to me, because a bunch of academics are the furthest thing on Earth from the police. Why can't vandals have a normal day in court and go to regular jail?
I don’t think you understand how long it takes for universities to decide how to handle punishment situations.
This one has a significant complication of parallel legal action. They seized and vandalized a building. They’ve been reviewing evidence and building cases for a long time.
If you’re operating an honest judicial board and you’re receiving high profile threats from the US government backed by huge funding cuts to the University, you have a choice. (1) Comply or simply appear to comply, by rendering a favorable ruling immediately, (2) Establish that your ruling is not the result of government pressure. You’d do the latter by (for example) showing your work and proving that the results were already determined before the pressure campaign began; or you’d change the timing so that it doesn’t look like cause and effect; you could even suspend your ruling on the grounds that maintaining the appearance of the University and Board’s independence is a higher priority than punishing a few protestors.
Columbia did none of the things in category (2). I know it’s 2025 and we have to pretend that this apparently corrupt thing is innocent, even while the folks involved make no effort to defend it. But it isn’t innocent, and everyone involved knows what’s going on.
There is no point in giving into threats if the other party is still going to follow through regardless. I think the best argument against this being due to political pressure from trump is it doesn't seem effective in getting rid of that pressure. If trump is the thing they care about here, why would they bother if trump is going to do trump things regardless.
I don't know what "reverse course" means here. This is extortion, not a simple transaction like purchasing a sandwich in a deli.
The Trump administration is withholding funding and simultaneously making a series of explicit (and completely inappropriate) demands that it wishes Columbia to comply with. I assume what we're watching is a kind of "negotiation" period in which Columbia either does or does not do various things, and then over time the Trump administration decides whether to relent or punish them further. There is no real pressure on the administration to just stop.
One of the explicit demands the administration made was for Columbia to disband the University Judicial Board (the exact group that handed down these decisions) presumably because they felt that it would not sufficiently punish the protesters. Coincidentally, around the same time this happened, the board "independently" decided to punish the protesters quite severely.
The perpetrator should be sued for damages which is the normal thing to happen. Withdrawing properly received credentials opens the door to yet another extra-judicial punishment and we already have too many of those.
(EDIT) I've since googled around a bit and am surprised that there does seem to be a degree of discretion available to the university to revoke degrees that I was unaware of. I had always considered degrees to be like an affidavit, a statement of a fact as the institution understands it. There are plenty of horrible people who have done heinous things and I've never heard of their degrees being taken away. Perhaps one difference here is that the behavior under question was during their undergrad.