Thirty years ago, when Bill Cosby was honored on the cover of TIME magazine, who’d have guessed that one day there’d be a rush on cleansing his image, his name and his memory from just about everything, everywhere.
Of course, there’s no erasing decades-old, archival TIME covers. But how far can we go? How far should we go to manage public memory?
Rescinding honorary degrees seemed the most popular place to start. Degrees have been revoked from some of the nearly 60 institutions of higher education that originally bestowed them, including Drexel University, Lehigh University, Haverford College, Swarthmore College, University of Pittsburgh, Drew University, Oberlin College, Brown University, Fordham University, Tufts University, Goucher College among others.
The comedian "stepped down" from Temple University’s Board of Trustees (although he retained his honorary degree from his alma mater).
New York University had a “William H. Cosby Future Filmmakers Workshop. The name has been changed.
Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park in Orlando, Florida had a Cosby statue. No more.
Both David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld requested their glowing blurbs be removed from a 2014 biography, Cosby: His Life and Times. "I know certain religions forbid idol worship," read Seinfeld's. "If anyone ever told me I had to stop idolizing Bill Cosby, I would say, 'Sorry, but I'm out of this religion.'"
Meanwhile, Philadelphia’s Gallery at the Market East quietly removed Cosby's portrait from a montage, illustrated above, before and after.
Is there more work to be done? In the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, the Wissahickon Boys Club has a historical marker celebrating this institution's continuous service—since the 1880s—in the city's African-American community. The marker names Cosby as one of its distinguished one-time members.
Will the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania do away with Bill Cosby’s name? Or should the marker language remain as is, a tainted vestige of fleeting fame?
What do you think?
