By Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com
May 30, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In a press release describing the man as a “renegade” and the “king of controversy,” Go Daddy (godaddy.com) reported Friday that its CEO Bob Parsons had received an honorary doctorate from the University of Baltimore.
Parsons was awarded the honorary doctorate in Humane Letters last week as he served as the keynote speaker for a commencement ceremony for the Yale Gordon School of Liberal Arts and Merrick School of Business. University president Robert Bogomolny presented Parsons with the degree.
According to a fairly short Wikipedia entry, the “Humane Letters” doctorate is always issued as an honorary degree, usually to individuals who have distinguished themselves in areas other than science, government, religion or literature, for which other specific honorary degrees exist.
According to the understandably favorable Go Daddy press release, Parson’s speech was particularly well received by the crowd of approximately 5,600 people at the Lyric Opera Theatre. A Baltimore Sun article reportedly described his address as “one of the most rousing of this commencement season.”
A video of the commencement ceremony is available on the university’s website.
Parsons is himself hails from Baltimore, and is an alumnus of the University of Baltimre, having graduated magna cum laude with an accounting degree in 1979, after returning from a period spent in Viet Nam as a US marine.
He is one of the hosting business’s most notable personalities, in part because Go Daddy has quickly become the largest hosting provider in the business. But his notoriety is also due in part to his purposeful efforts to court controversy with the company’s television advertisements. And Parsons is personally outspoken, a vocal blogger and more recently an Internet radio host and most recently a video blogger.
In April of this year, Go Daddy reported that Parsons had presented to students at the adult education institution Western International University, as the speaker for that school’s commencement, which was to take place May 18, in Phoenix, Arizona.
