Sean “Diddy” Combs took a break from teasing those two poor guys in the desert from his 4-door Fiat to give a graduation commencement speech at Howard University over the weekend, but the fun barely stopped there. In addition to Diddy, P. Diddy, Puffy, Puff Daddy, and P. Doodle Diddy Daddy Diaper Dandy Didgeridoo, we now get to call Combs an honorary Doctor of Humanities, because the Howard officials awarded that title to the rapper/actor/entrepreneur for all of the work that he’s done in establishing himself as a “master brand maker” and humanitarian. The honor brings Combs’s college education full circle, as he attended Howard for two years in the late 80s, before he dropped out in 1990. The rest, of course, is Notorious history.
As Combs put it in the opening minutes of his commencement speech, he wasn’t exactly the typical speaker that the Howard Board of Trustees might have expected. Equal parts serious and funny, sentimental and even political, Combs explained how discovering that his father had been murdered in a drug deal motivated him to become an entrepreneur “the legal way,” and he thanked his mom for working four jobs just so he could go to college in the first place. I bet she doesn’t mind that he dropped out now, but back then she was probably just a little upset about it.
