It is the job of university administrators to bring prestige and honor to their institutions, and I am sure that the administrators at ASU thought that they had done just that when the sitting President of the United States accepted their invitation for commencement speaker. Sadly another job of administrators is to understand the contextual factors of their university.
Did some poor administrator at ASU forget that he or she was working in the state that refused the Martin Luther King Day holiday or that still has not come to terms with Daylight Savings Time? This is the state where Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio is considered a hero! Poor ASU Presdent Michael Crowe! Is it getting a little harder for you to fend off the calls to take a pay cut?
Universities like to think of themselves as bastions of logic, truth and honor that prepare people to build a better future, but every University has tenured a few professors that make the rest of the faculty cringe. While most faculty see committee work as service, there are those who use such appointments for self-service and self-aggrandizement. Obviously there was at least one person on the honorary degree committee who blocked honoring the first African-American President of the United States. There are and always have been those faculty members, self-ordained by their own perceived godliness, who work counter to the good of the institution just because they love the power to do so.
I am sure that those on the ASU campus know exactly which faculty member, or more embarrassingly members, who fought for narrow personal political aims. While such committees are far from open and transparent, a look down the list of previous honorees may prove to be highly correlated with the Foundation's Honor Roll.
While the intention of the Grand Obstructionist Person on the committee may have been to snub our sitting president, Barack Obama's natural grace and humor will win in the end. The man who earned our nation's support to be elected the first U.S. President of color has a lifetime achievement in overcoming slights and snubs from small, bigoted people who believe they have the right.