Colin Powell Honorary Degree

President Joel Seligman and Board of Trustees
University of Rochester
Rochester, New York

Dear President Seligman and Trustees:

As faculty, students and staff at the University of Rochester we strongly oppose the award by this institution of an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree to Colin Powell.

It seems incongruous for the university to have welcomed with much fanfare the Gandhi center for nonviolence this past year, and then to honor Colin Powell, whose falsehoods before the United Nations led to the unnecessary and unjust war in Iraq. According to the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet as of July 2006, some 677,000 innocent Iraqi civilians have died as a result of this illegal and unjust invasion and occupation. Since then the reputable group Iraq Body Count and an independent British polling company, Opinion Research Business, have estimated that more than 1 million Iraqis have died as a result of the US invasion as of September 2007. These are in addition to the approximately 3800 American deaths. Approximately 28,000 American soldiers have been wounded and/or maimed for life. The wounded and displaced in Iraq are uncounted, but number in the millions.

We would be remiss as members of the university community not to voice our opposition to this honor. For an educational institution to award an honorary degree to such a figure contradicts, in our view, many of the very principles fundamental to the institution. We have no illusions that we can stop it from occurring, but we can register our disagreement with the administration and those who have taken it upon themselves to use this as an opportunity to make a political statement with which many of us disagree.

Colin Powell shares major responsibility for the debacle in Iraq. He was also the Secretary of State in an administration that consistently and deceptively linked Iraq with the events of September 11, 2001. For an educational institution to award an honorary degree to such a figure contradicts the very principles of education.