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Reaction: Spelman College Suspends Professorship with Bill Cosby Name

December 18th, 2014

Atlanta’s Spelman College is distancing itself from Bill Cosby.

It follows other institutions like the Berklee School of Music, Temple University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Cosby’s alma mater.

WABE’s Rose Scott reports Spelman is suspending a professorship that bears the Cosby name.

If there’s a value on silence, Bill Cosby’s decision to remain largely quiet about the numerous sexual assault allegations has cost him a lot.

And it goes beyond money Cosby receives through sponsorships and television royalties.

It’s costing Cosby’s his philanthropic brand.

In 1988 Spelman College got 20-million dollars from Cosby and his wife Camille.

Part of it went to an endowed professorship.

In a statement on Sunday, President Beverly Daniel Tatum says a Cosby professorship is to enhance what she calls intellectual, cultural and creative life of the college.

But for now that won’t continue, at least with the Cosby name.

According to Tatum, Spelman is “suspending the program until such time that the original goals can again be met.”

Noted author and playwright Pearl Cleage, is not only a past Cosby chair, she’s a Spelman alum.

“I think it’s entirely appropriate for the college to suspend that active relationship with him until he has clarified the issues in whatever way he thinks is appropriate,” says Cleage.

Those issues are numerous sexual assault claims brought against Cosby.

The most recent allegation comes from another icon, supermodel Beverly Johnson.

So why is Spelman taking action now?

Professor Valerie Grim chairs the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University.

“I think probably the primary issue might be is that is a women’s institution and that it has a particular mission and position about gender about women.”

Back to Pearl Cleage, she hopes despite the Cosby scholar’s suspension, there’s still a lesson to be learned.

“I think that the complexity of this issue is something that I hope will make people look at the whole ideal of powerful people and the way that the manifest that power over people who work for them.”

The endowed Professorship isn’t the only place that has the Cosby name.

There’s an academic center at Spelman named for Dr. Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby, the embattled comedian’s wife.