Wagner College Joins Lehigh Revoking Trump Honorary Degree
Lehigh University Revokes Trump’s Honorary Degree Given in 1988
(Bloomberg) -- Wagner College, a private school in the New York borough of Staten Island, voted to rescind an honorary degree given to President Donald Trump, after Lehigh University revoked the same honor earlier Friday.
Lehigh, a private school in Pennsylvania, awarded the degree to Trump in 1988, and had resisted earlier calls by the faculty to take back the degree.
Individuals including cabinet secretaries and institutions have distanced themselves from Trump since his supporters vandalized the Capitol and disrupted Congress during Wednesday’s certification of the Electoral College count.
A committee of the Lehigh’s board of trustees voted to strip the degree Thursday, followed by the full board on Friday, according to a statement from the school in Bethlehem.
Wagner’s trustees met in a special session to review the honorary degree granted to Trump in 2004 and voted to rescind it, the school said later Friday.
Trump has also been awarded degrees from Liberty University, the school whose commencement he spoke at in 2017, and Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland, which rescinded the degree in 2015 amid a uproar over Trump’s comments about banning Muslims from entering the U.S.
A spokesman for Liberty, the Lynchburg, Virginia-based school founded by evangelical preacher Jerry Falwell, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
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