Retired Citigroup CEO Sanford Weill will receive an honorary doctorate, as will his wife, Joan, from Sonoma State University in Northern California, on May 12. Since the university made the announcement, students, faculty and staff have voiced outrage, describing the degree as a “dishonor” to their graduating class and a shame on the school’s ethics and reputation. They even set up a website, www.shameonssu.org to register the flood of complaints that poured in. And here’s why.

After retiring as the CEO of Citigroup, the largest “too-big-to-fail” bank that got bailed out by taxpayers several years back, Weill gave $12 million for SSU’s new Green Music Center. How Weill made his money, and what strings were attached to his donation to SSU, are questions many feel still need answering – if the answers aren’t clear enough already.

A major purveyor of toxic mortgages, Citigroup required $45 billion in government investment and a $300 billion guarantee of its bad assets to avoid bankruptcy. Weill retired shortly before the 2008 crash. “Laughing All the Way From the Bank” was how the New York Times headlined the story.

Why Students in Debt are Rebelling

“Sandy Weill is greedy,” says graduating senior Melanie Sanders of SSU’s Hutchins School. “He is a symbol of a nation’s economy becoming increasingly unbalanced and building the accounts of the ultra rich on the backs of the very poor. Half of my school loans are with Citigroup. I once took out $15,000 in student loans. Now $29,365 is due.”

Such debt doubling is no longer unusual. It used to be called usury and was considered in the least immoral, and often illegal. Weill, Citigroup and other big financial institutions were among those responsible for creating student debt bondage to banks in recent decades. Another student described her huge bank debt as a form of “indentured servitude” and “the mortgage of my future.”

National student debt recently reached $1 trillion, larger than the nation’s total credit card debt. What futures might these college students have to look forward to? They can expect fewer job opportunities and many of their family homes foreclosed and family members evicted.

“I am financially broken by his former company and unlikely to recover,” adds Sanders. “I am compelled to protest this award. I must now call my grandma and explain that I will be protesting at my graduation ceremony. I am personally offended that he will be at my graduation and receiving a degree.”

SSU Students Speak Out

“Weill represents a misuse of power, a lack of accountability, and economic abuse of people,” remarked Christopher Bowers, who will receive an M.A. in counseling psychology.

“Tainted money” and “reparations for ill-gotten sins” is how a retired faculty member described Weill’s gift to the college to finish construction of the Green Music Center. The honorary degree, he added, amounts to a symbolic “absolution of sins.” A local editor described the gift as “the redemption-through-the-arts route.”

Citigroup has paid many fines over the years, including $3 billion for involvement in the Enron scandal a decade previously. While serving as Attorney General, California Governor Jerry Brown then wrote that Citigroup “knowingly stole from customers, mostly poor people and the recently deceased.” The mega-bank has reported spending $23 million in contributions to political candidates over the years. It has been charged numerous times with fraud, conflict of interest and outright theft.

In a recent article, “For He’s a Jolly Good Scoundrel,” Robert Scheer describes Weill as a “hustler who led the successful lobbying to reverse the Glass-Steagall law” in 1999. Enacted after the Great Depression to protect Americans from the kind of economic collapse we are now experiencing, the law had been a firewall between investment and commercial banks.

With the undoing of Glass-Steagall toward the end of President Clinton’s term, up went Weill’s fortunes and those of his 1% friends, and down went the fortunes of the 99% as the gap between rich and poor grew steadily larger. Forbes magazine lists Weill as the 75th richest American. Simultaneously, Time Magazine recently included Weill’s name in its list of “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis.”, though he announced yesterday he's done accepting blame. His Sonoma estate cost him $30 million, and included a red Ferrari. All of which begs the question: Is Weill really the model students should be following? Or does he, more truthfully, represent the height of greed and corruption?

The Corporatization of Higher Education

Weill’s degree exemplifies a trend in public higher education, which is being increasingly corporatized and privatized to meet the financial desires of big banks and mega-corporations rather than the needs of students and citizens.

Strong public education was once a primary source of California’s—and the United States’s—sense of its democracy and greatness. And the decline of the country’s public school systems, through cutbacks, tuition hikes and un-payable student debt, has meant a loss of something fundamental in American society.

“Education has lost its soul in many respects,” says Sonoma State sociology professor Noel Byrne. “The corporatization of universities is a fundamental betrayal of the essence of higher education.”

The majority of faculty members here have been highly critical of SSU President Ruben Armiñana, who made the decision to give Weill the honorary degree. In a campus-wide referendum, faculty voted a resounding 73.4% No Confidence in his leadership in 2007—still one more sign of the way many feel that their democracy is no longer working for them.

“The honorary doctorate given to Weill is SSU's pandering to the power elite,” said Carolyn Epple, a former tenured SSU professor and current activist with nearby Occupy Santa Rosa. “Much as Weil used the country as his own economic playground for personal gain, so too have many in SSU's administration turned education into their own schemes for economic gain.”

Epple added, “While faculty struggle to provide quality education consistent with being a public liberal arts college, SSU's administration has increased class sizes, reduced faculty benefits, ignored students' requests to graduate in a reasonable time, and created subsidiary corporations.”

Protests against Weill’s bought-and-paid for degree have already begun. On April 27, Peace and Justice activist Susan Lamont and another Occupy Santa Rosa participant passed out a document about Weill at a dinner held in his honor at the Green Music Center. They also held up a sign: “King of the Subprime Mortgages—Architect of the Great Recession.”

Whether more dramatic, loud or colorful demonstrations happen on May 12 at SSU, no one knows. But what is likely is that Occupy, and its partners, will indeed exercise their First Amendment rights of free speech and freedom of assembly—before government further restricts those rights in favor of a government of the 1%, by the 1% and for the 1%. If anyone gives credibility to the popular Occupy chant, it’s Weill and Citigroup: “Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out.”

Dr. Shepherd Bliss has been a teacher at SSU for the past four years.

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