Catt deserved her honorary degree at ISU

I am writing in response to “Iowa Regents Adopt new revocation-degree policy including for honorary degrees” ( The Gazette, March 25, updated March 27,).

Over a million degrees have been awarded since the founding of UI, ISU, and UNI plus an additional 231 honorary degrees, however, the photographs accompanying the article and much of the text reference Iowa State.

Norman Borlaug must have been selected to be pictured as someone with solely an honorary degree from ISU. He was born and raised in Iowa, but a graduate of the University of Minnesota. As the caption states, he won the Nobel Peace Prize; additionally, he has over 50 honorary degrees, one of them being from Iowa State.

Carrie Chapman Catt earned a B.S. from Iowa State and was the only woman in her class. Additionally, she holds an honorary degree from ISU, one of her four Honorary Doctor of Laws degrees, the others being from Smith College. the University of Wyoming, and the Moravian College for Women, the sixth oldest college in the United States.

Catt was selected to receive a vast number of other awards for her national and international suffrage work, her commitment to peace, and her unflagging effort to call attention to the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany. She was praised by both Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt who wrote, “. . .the whole country applauds you and your very great contributions to our well-being,” Mary Church Terrell called her “a dear friend”, “a great, good, and gifted woman”, and wrote in her autobiography that Catt was “without racial prejudice.”

The Gazette article mentions none of this, but references an online petition, first posted in June 19, 2020 which accuses Catt of holding “racist, anti-Black, classist, ableist, and xenophobic beliefs” and claims “Though her deeds were seemingly selfless, she was motivated by a hunger to further imbalance the power dynamic between white and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) Americans by empowering white women while suppressing the voices of BIPOC.”

When reading and signing an online petition, it is important to remember that is much easier to sign a name than to do the work involved in researching the truth of that petition. Documentation is (or should be) more respected than name calling. The petition itself contains one sentence of documentation from Catt’s 723 speeches, books, and several hundred articles.

Finally, Catt clearly expressed her views on who should have the right to suffrage in an article she wrote for The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, “Everybody counts in applying democracy. And there will never be a true democracy until every responsible and law-abiding adult in it, without regard to race, sex, color or creed has his or her own inalienable and unpurchasable voice in government.”

Jane Cox is professor Emerita at Iowa State University where she studied Carrie Chapman Catt and the women’s suffrage movement for over 30 years.