If only Michael Crow had eaten some namesake fowl and backed down from his mighty institution's boneheaded decision not to give President Barack Obama an honorary sheepskin. It would have been so simple. And it would have spared ASU from being the butt of endless jokes and the object of scorn and derision on The Daily Show, which famously called ASU "the Harvard of date rape."

There's wicked karma involved here. Crow has earned a rep as dictatorial and moralistic, forcing upon the party school a wishful paradigm of abstemiousness and academics, while going to war against the fraternities and their Animal House ways. Dean Wormer-like, he put his foot down.

Now everything Crow's strived for has been undone, and ASU will be remembered as the place that refused to grant the nation's first black president a worthless piece of paper because it didn't deem him worthy. At least the country got to see what we put up with. And we all got a good laugh over it.