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What are the other unspoken--bias might be the wrong word, but unspoken requirements, shall we say?
[pause]. Requirements? Well, you know--it's also very subjective. If somebody nominates a poet, there are those who like his poetry and there are those who don't like his poetry. You also have to be willing to be there, you can't get it in absentia. So some people are so gerontological that they can't make it [laughter]. And the other thing that I tried to do particularly was, I recognized that it's partly honorary degree, and it's partly theater. And you've got 20,000 people out front, and you want to get a variety in the cast: you have between eight and twelve honorary degrees, so you're weighing both merit, sex, color, different disciplines, and some non-disciplines--famous foreign minister, or something like that, former head of state, or somebody who's a great hero, or a great actress. So to some degree, you want it to be a crowd-pleaser. It's very difficult to have a crowd-pleaser that has got merit, combines one of each, and nobody can say: “Well, my God, you've left out--! How could--” And then sometimes, you've settled on a list, and everybody is agreeing, and you're saying, “Agh, thank God”--and then three of them say, for one reason or another, they can't come. So then you have to go down to list number two. List number two tends to look rather weak.
Do you vote? Do you actually vote?
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