Howard College’s board of trustees voted unanimously on Friday to revoke the honorary diploma awarded to Sean “Diddy” Combs in 2014, saying he’s “now not worthy to carry the establishment’s highest honor.”
Howard, a non-public, traditionally Black analysis college in Washington, D.C., will even return Combs’ $1 million contribution and terminate a $1 million pledge settlement from the Sean Combs Basis, the board stated in a press release.
“Mr. Combs’ habits as captured in a not too long ago launched video is so essentially incompatible with Howard College’s core values and beliefs that he’s deemed now not worthy to carry the establishment’s highest honor,” the board stated in its assertion. “The College is unwavering in its opposition to all acts of interpersonal violence.”
The rebuke is very important given Combs’ longtime ties to the college. Combs was a enterprise main at Howard, however left after his second 12 months. In 2014, he acquired an honorary doctorate in humanities from Howard and delivered the graduation tackle.
Final month, CNN first aired a 2016 surveillance video displaying Combs bodily assaulting his former girlfriend, singer Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, in a hallway on the now-closed InterContinental Lodge within the Century Metropolis neighborhood of Los Angeles. Within the video, dated March 5, 2016, Combs seems to shove Ventura to the bottom, kick her twice, drag her down a hallway and throw glass vases at her.
The video of the assault was graphic and disturbing – one of many few occasions the general public has really seen, and never simply learn or heard about, an incident of home abuse.
Combs launched a video posted on Instagram days after the video’s launch, saying, “My habits on that video is inexcusable. I take full accountability for my actions in that video.”
However no apology could make individuals un-see that video. “We discover the photographs extraordinarily disturbing and troublesome to look at,” the workplace of L.A. District Lawyer George Gascón wrote in a press release on Instagram on Could 17. However the D.A. added that “if the conduct depicted occurred in 2016, sadly, we’d be unable to cost.”
Established in 1867, Howard presents undergraduate, graduate {and professional} levels in additional than 120 packages. Notable Howard alumni from the humanities embody actors Chadwick Boseman, Phylicia Rashad, Anthony Anderson, Roxie Roker and Taraji P. Henson; comic and TV character Nick Cannon; novelist Toni Morrison; novelist and poet Paul Laurence Dunbar; and author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates.
