Class News

Dan Berman '64 protests another Yale honorary degree

Dan Berman has been campaigning to get Yale to revoke the honorary degree awarded to Stephan Schmidheiny in 1996. Dan’s published letters and articles (below) make a strong case, especially since Yale revoked Bill Cosby’s honorary degree in 2018 (something Yale had never done before).

[As a postscript, on May 23, 2019 Schmidheiny was sentenced in Italy to a four-year prison term for asbestos-linked manslaughter. Read more.]

Another degree to rescind?

Yale Alumni Magazine

January/February 2019

Letter to the Editor

by Dan Berman '64

Five years ago, 60 Yale alumni petitioned the Yale Corporation to rescind its 1996 honorary doctorate to Stephan Schmidheiny. Yale's response was that throughout its history, no such honor had ever been revoked.

This long-standing practice is no more. After Bili Cosby’s conviction for drugging and raping a woman, Yale revoked his honorary degree. Clearly, this decision compels us to reconsider the Schmidheiny case.

In 2013, Schmidheiny was found guilty, for the second time, by an Italian appeals court, and sentenced to 18 years in prison for "creating an environmental disaster causing the deaths of over 2,000 people in Italy.” His Eternit Corporation caused this tragedy among employees and neighbors of its asbestos factories. His conviction was overturned in 2014 on technical statute-of-limitations grounds. He is currently being retried for manslaughter in Turin.

As shown at trial. Schmidheiny was well aware of the dangers of asbestos. In 1976, he organized two conferences to train his managers to downplay the dangers to workers and the media. A conference document records his damning conclusion:

It is important not to panic. These three days were essential to technical managers, who were shocked. This must not happen to the workers.

Schmidheiny’s Yale honor is in one sense more repulsive than Cosby’s. We believe it was to preempt prosecution for his environmental crimes that Schmidheiny sold and closed his asbestos businesses around the world and made large gifts to Yale and others, for conservation causes. Yale honored him specifically for "his corporate role to promote stewardship of the global environment.”

This honor must not stand.

Daniel Berman '64
Davis, CA

Martin Cherniack '70
Clinton, CT

See also Dan's published article on Stephan Schmidheiny, and another article. Also of interest is the following letter from the mayor of an affected town in Italy:

8 novembre 2018
Prot. n.35138 CP/sf

To Mrs. Kathrin Day Lassila, Editor, Yale Alumni Magazine:

I am writing to you in response to your article published in July-August 2018 about the controversy over retraction of Yale Honorary Degrees to Stephan Schmidheiny and Bill Cosby.

I am the Mayor of the community that has been most grievously affected because of the operation of Mr. Schmidheiny's giant asbestos factory in our town in Italy.

The city of Casale Monferrato, symbol of the struggle against asbestos in Italy and in the world, asks the University of Yale to rescind the honorary degree conferred to Schmidheiny in 1996, having rescinded the one conferred to Bill Cosby.

In fact Schmidheiny, twice sentenced in Italy to 18 years jail for permanent willful environmental disaster, for having knowingly exposed workers and the community to the polluting agent. In fact, this led to the death of over 3000 people in the Casale District; many more continue to be diagnosed — a figure unfortunately on the rise — in Italy and in the world.

Yale's honorary degree damages its prestigious image as a world class university for two reasons: ethically because it rewards murderous behaviour, and academically because by awarding the honour it ignores the established scientific evidence on the correlation between asbestos and mesothelioma, a deadly disease.

Most respectfully,

Titti Palazzetti
Mayor of Casale Monferrato

Letter to Yale President Peter Salovey

May 21, 2019

SUBJECT: Yale's Revocation of a Doctorate of Humane Letters to Stephan Schmidheiny

TO: President Peter Salovey, Yale Trustees, and our Yale '64 classmates

FROM: Daniel Berman, James Burdick, Charles Chatfield-Taylor, John Culliney, Shannon Ferguson, Richard Peck (all Yale College '64)*

The three Yale trustees on the Awards Committee in 1996 could not have known about the crimes for which Mr. Stephan Schmidheiny was later convicted because of the criminally lax management of his Eternit asbestos-cement plant in Casale Monferrato, Italy.
Five years ago Yale Vice President Kimberly M. Goff-Crews told us that our university could not revoke Mr. Schmidheiny’s 1996 Doctorate of Humane Letters because Yale had never revoked an honorary degree in the past. By revoking its honorary degree to Mr. Bill Cosby in 2018, the Yale Corporation created a precedent which applies to Mr. Schmidheiny.
To President Salovey: In your lunch-hour remarks to our Class of '64 Reunion next May 31 at Pierson College, I hope you can assure us that at the Yale Corporation meeting this June 8th you will recommend the revocation of Yale's award to Mr. Schmidheiny, just as Yale revoked a similar honor to Mr. Cosby last year.

BACKGROUND: According to testimony introduced at his trial in Italy in 2012/2013, Mr. Schmidheiny was very knowledgeable about the lethality of asbestos. At that trial the evidence showed that he had organized two training sessions to teach his managers how to hide the causes of asbestos-related deaths from Eternit employees and their unions, from the mass media, and from neighbors in Casale Monferrato and the public at large. A 1992 memo from his public relations firm which was quoted at the trial expressed Mr. Schmidheiny's satisfaction that liability in Italy had been successfully blamed on the firm's Italian managers, thus protecting Mr. Schmidheiny and his Swiss-based fortune.

Mr. Schmidheiny — a multi-billionaire who owned asbestos factories in over 20 countries — was sentenced to 18 years of prison for his role in over 2,000 deaths from asbestos disease caused by exposures at his Eternit factory in Casale Monferrato. That verdict was overturned on a statute-of-limitations technicality by Italy's highest court in November 2014. He is now being tried for manslaughter in Turin for two deaths caused by asbestos exposure at his Casale factory, and is also scheduled to go on trial for murder in Naples later this year because of the lethal consequences of an asbestos factory he owned in Bagnoli, a suburb of Naples.

Sincerely yours,

Daniel M. “Dan” Berman '64

danmbermon@gmail.com, 530-383-5510 (cell), 530-757-6609 (home),
1103 Maple Lane, Davis, CA 95616

*In 2014 Dan Berman sent the Yale Corporation a list of 62 alumni who had signed a petition calling for Yale "to revoke Stephan Schmidheiny's Doctorate of Humane Letters."