As a former university professor with 4 degrees from 3 different colleges, I take pride in my academic accomplishments: along the way, I was awarded numerous scholarships, fellowships, dean's lists, a dissertation award, summa cum laude for my BA (I think one of 2 in my university class), academic honor societies, and multiple doctoral consortia selections. This isn't intended to be a brag sheet. The point is that I worked hard for my credentials; I have a property interest in them, the results of innumerable hours of hard work and study, playing by the rules. I'm sure I have many opinions that my former colleagues, teachers, professors and/or administrators may strongly disagree with (I've never discussed politics with my professors); the idea that they could just strip away my honors is just an abomination, something that would violate the very notion of cherished academic freedom. This doesn't mean I would find it easy to return to academia given its progressive groupthink; I haven't been actively recruited for a conventional university position in probably 20 years. (I have been contacted over the last few years about a couple of adjunct positions and one of those nationally advertised Internet-based university programs (they wanted me for their data science program.)) I have flirted with the idea of producing and marketing my own classes in a way analogous to Tom Woods and Brion McClanahan.
This issue of degree revocation is not a real concern of mine, but I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of certain prominent Harvard alumni in Congress and/or the Trump Administration. Ironically I first heard about it on FNC (there's only so much CNN I can take). I then Googled the topic and found confirmation in this Daily Caller post:
Several Harvard graduates were named [in the Harvard student post-DC riot petition], including Republican Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
Now degree revocation is extremely rare [I've never heard of it happening in any of the colleges I've attended or taught at]; I did a brief Internet search, and it seems if and when it's happened, it usually involves instances of academic fraud (say, for example, if you rigged the results in a laboratory experiment or largely plagiarized your dissertation). I can tell you from having pursued cheating students at UWM and UTEP, a university professor has to go through administrative hell because of due process policies, and I had smoking gun evidence of misconduct. And no college, even politically correct ones, wants to open Pandora's box of politicizing conferred degrees; you could potentially turn off up to half your alumni donor base, among other things. Not to mention turn off prospective students who themselves hold unpopular political opinions: would you spend 4 years of your life pursuing a degree knowing something unrelated you do or say in the future might result in such a sanction? So much for "diversity" at Harvard... I don't think even progressive faculty at Harvard want an unconscionable precedent against academic freedom being set.
