Harvard students create petition to revoke degrees of Trump allies including Ted Cruz, Kayleigh McEnany
A group of Harvard University students have created a petition to revoke the degrees of numerous allies of President Donald Trump, who supported his efforts to reject the presidential election results, following the violence at Capitol Hill last week.
According to the histrionic students, whose petition was first publicized by Fox Business, the campaign to alter the outcome of the 2020 presidential election resulted in the deaths of five people “and nearly killed many more as armed, organized insurrectionists with Confederate flags and Nazi paraphernalia stormed the Capitol in search of members of Congress to kill or capture.”
The students named a number of a dozen or so Harvard graduates whom they claim “worked hard to spread the disinformation and distrust that created last Wednesday’s insurrection,” including Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Senator Ted Cruz, and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
“Harvard must revoke the degrees of alumni whose incendiary language and subversion of democratic processes–rooted in a history of white supremacist voter suppression–incited the violent insurrection on January 6. This includes all who have used their platforms to deny the validity of the presidential election. They do not and should not represent a university committed to "strengthening democracy" and ‘the advancement of justice,’” the students wrote.
The petition refers to former students who graduated from Harvard and completed their degrees. In recent days, a number of other colleges have revoked the honorary degrees of some of its recipients who supported President Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.
"The violence on Capitol Hill is not an isolated incident, and it will not be the last if institutions like Harvard continue to allow white supremacy to go unchallenged," the petitioners wrote.
According to Fox Business, the petition began circulating on Wednesday, and is said to have traction among both current and former students. It is unclear if Harvard’s administration will respond to the students’ demand.
The students claim that a Harvard degree is a “privilege, not a right,” and therefore individuals like Cruz and McEnany are not entitled to keep their degrees. Supporters of the petition cited Harvard’s 2010 decision to revoke a degree from a known Russian spy, Andrey Bezrukov, as a precedent.
Speaking to Fox Business, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard Law disagreed with the petition, describing it as “illegal and highly immoral to revoke a degree based on constitutionally protected actions like former students merely supporting the president.”
Dershowitz stated that “the end result would be to jeopardize federal funding,” because the university would become a de facto political institution.
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