Degrees of DiplomacyBy Tamara Fynaardt

A year before he became the 41st president of the United States, George H.W. Bush became Northwestern College’s most famous honorary degree recipient.

November 19, 1987. Sharpshooters perched on the top of the Orange City grain elevator. Bomb-sniffing dogs paced inside the Rowenhorst Student Center while a helicopter circled overhead.

Inside, the highest ranking government official ever to visit Northwestern College, Vice President George H.W. Bush, sat before a packed arena and listened as music professor Dr. Herb Ritsema listed his achievements: naval aviator at the age of 18, Yale University graduate, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, director of the CIA, Ronald Reagan’s running mate.

The impressive litany was followed by the conferring of an honorary Doctor of Laws degree, making the future president Northwestern’s most famous honoree.

Former Vice President for Academic Affairs Dr. Harold Heie, who placed the academic hood over Bush’s head, remembers the veep leaning over during the introduction, pointing to his program and asking, “Where are we?”

Political scandal often misses agreeable little communities like Northwestern, but the dignified ceremony and Bush’s nonpartisan speech on family values were the culmination of weeks of campus controversy.

The campaign to award Bush an honorary degree was launched when Andrea Van Beek ’74, a Board of Trustees member and chair of the Sioux County Republicans at the time, asked Bush, a personal friend, to include northwest Iowa in his fall travel.

She’d seen a list of Northwestern’s honorary degree recipients—honorees like Sen. Mark Hatfield and the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale—and asked President Jim Bultman, “Wouldn’t it be nice to see the vice president’s name on this list?” Bultman agreed.

Plans to bestow the degree were announced on campus in October, around the time Bush announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination. Protestors were small in number, but vocal. Incensed Democrats and others argued that honoring a Republican candidate this close to the Iowa caucuses was inappropriate—tantamount to a political endorsement.

Bultman maintained that the honorary degree was being given to a statesman who had achieved much, including the second-highest office in the land. He insisted the pomp and circumstance were not political.

Impassioned protestors wrote scathing letters to the Beacon student newspaper, advocating boycotting the event and other forms of protest. The controversy escalated when the Young Democrats organized a mock election, asking voters to determine whether an honorary degree should be given to George Bush, the burning bush, or Busch beer.

On the 19th, though, even dissidents—who wore orange stickers as a sign of their protest—couldn’t resist watching as Secret Service agents ushered the vice president’s motorcade through campus.

After Bush and his entourage of politicos and press had left, students tallied the results of the mock election. The burning bush edged out George Bush by 50 to 42 votes.

Votes for Busch beer were not counted.