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 “not worthy to carry the establishment’s highest honor.”
Howard, a personal, 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 mentioned in a press release.
“Mr. Combs’ habits as captured in a just lately launched video is so basically incompatible with Howard College’s core values and beliefs that he’s deemed not worthy to carry the establishment’s highest honor,” the board mentioned in its assertion. “The College is unwavering in its opposition to all acts of interpersonal violence.”
The rebuke is very vital 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 handle.
Final month, CNN first aired a 2016 surveillance video exhibiting Combs bodily assaulting his former girlfriend, singer Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, in a hallway on the now-closed InterContinental Resort 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 instances 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 folks un-see that video. “We discover the pictures extraordinarily disturbing and tough to observe,” the workplace of L.A. District Lawyer George Gascón wrote in a press release on Instagram on Might 17. However the D.A. added that “if the conduct depicted occurred in 2016, sadly, we might be unable to cost.”
Established in 1867, Howard gives undergraduate, graduate {and professional} levels in additional than 120 applications. Notable Howard alumni from the humanities embrace 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.