Universities revoke Charlie Rose's journalism awards amid harassment scandal

Yeah, I don't get that. If the award was for citizenship or feminism or something like that, then I could see pulling it. But the award was for excellence in journalism. While I might think Charlie Rose is pompous ass, the university apparently thought enough of how he did his job that they gave him an award for it, and they showed no sign of changing their mind about that as recently as a week ago.

It's like the Heisman committee retroactively taking back O.J. Simpson's Heisman Trophy because of stuff he did decades later, or the NCAA taking away USC's National Championship because Reggie Bush got some perks he wasn't supposed to get. They did what they did on the field to earn those awards, and nothing that happened off the field changed what happened on the field.

The only example I can think of where an award was legitimately taken back was in 2002 -- the Bancroft Award is given to chosen authors of American History, and in 2001, it was awarded to Michael Bellisiles for a book he wrote in 2000 called Arming America. The premise of the book was that there were far fewer guns in American than anybody had previously thought, and that a lot of guns were junk, and that the 2nd Amendment was misunderstood and doesn't defend individual gun ownership the way a lot of people think. Long story short, he basically made most of it up -- when people (including people who supported him) tried to replicate his research, they couldn't do it. When asked about his sources, his answers were inconsistent and evasive. When the narrative crashed, it embarrassed a lot of people on the left who had heralded him as hero. They took the award away from him because he never really earned it in the first place.

The award didn’t happen. *smirk*