Harvard Grade Inflation Ethics and the DEI Train Wreck, Part I: A Depressing Protest From Students “Of Color”

[This is a long post, but I urge you to read it all the way through. I cannot imagine a more powerful rebuttal to the advocates of “diversity, equity and inclusion.”]

Last October, in “Harvard’s Self-Indicting Grade Inflation Report,” I wrote about the school’s embarrassing report that revealed that 60% of the grades handed out at the supposedly elite college (my alma matter, and my sister’s, and my father’s, where my mother was Dean of Housing once-upon-a-time) are now As, making Harvard resemble Garrisons Keilor’s imaginary Minnesota community where “all the children” seem to be are “above average” even though that’s impossible.

In a prescient comment (as is often the case), AM Golden wrote in part, taking off from a Dean Amanda Claybaugh’s statement that it was desirable to “ produce a broader distribution of grades,”

That’s the problem. They don’t want to admit they accept unqualified applicants because many of those applicants will be disproportionately minorities. Returning standards to what an elite institution should have will mess with the faculty push for D.E.I. The standards have to stay low if the experiment is to be prioritized over pure academics. They have set too many precedents to easily back away now…

They have created bubbles where remote learning, mask wearing, protesting for the correct causes and making equal outcomes are virtues valued over a solid education. Backing up now will cause mass revolt on campuses. Like the news media, the colleges will be accused of caving to Trump. The asylum has been run by people who should have been inmates for so long that the actual inmates can’t be helped.

Sometimes I think Ethics Alarms is the only online community where clear-eyed vision dependably resides. For right on cue, as Harvard announced a long term effort to start grading seriously again, a coalition of “of color” Harvard students sent this open letter to the campus:

Ethics Hero: Laura Hughes

The widow of high school teacher Jason Hughes, 40, who died during a student prank gone horribly wrong in Gainesville, Georgia, is demonstrating how some human beings can overcome anger, bitterness and the emotional need for retribution, choosing compassion and empathy instead.

Around 11 p.m. on March 6, Jordan Wallace, Elijah Tate Owens, Aiden Hucks, Ana Katherine Luque and Ariana Cruz, all 18-years-old, toilet-papered trees outside the Hughes’ home, a continuation of their school’s tradition of such pranks during exam week. As the group piled into two vehicles to flee, Jason Hughes ran out of his home to confront the teens, but tripped and fell into the road. Wallace, who had already begun speeding away in a pickup truck, accidentally ran over the prone teacher. The teens left their vehicles to render aid, but Hughes perished in the incident.

All five teens were charged with criminal trespassing and littering on private property; Wallace has has been charged with first degree murder as well as reckless driving.

Laura Hughes, who is also a teacher, is pleading with authorities to drop the criminal charges. “We ask that you continue to pray for our family and also for the students involved in the accident along with their families,” she said in a statement to reporters. “Please join us in extending grace and mercy to them as Christ has done for us…This is a terrible tragedy, and our family is determined to prevent a separate tragedy from occurring, ruining the lives of these students.”

The late father of two (above, next to his wife) wasn’t trying to angrily confront the pranksters but “was excited and waiting to catch them in the act,” Laura told the New York Times. Insisting that her husband was not pursuing the students to reprimand them but rather to express comradery with their innocently-intended prank. Hughes said that criminal punishment “would be counter to Jason’s lifelong dedication of investing in the lives of these children.”

First degree murder sounds like extreme over-charging by authorities. The entire episode is a blazing example of the caprices of moral luck. I agree that the students’ punishment should be left to the school if Laura Hughes doesn’t want to press charges. Ethics tells us that it is time to mitigate the damage, not to make the damage worse.

Jesse Jackson Jr. Properly Slams Obama and Biden for Trying To Turning His Father’s Funeral Into An Anti-Trump Campaign Rally

Well good for him.

Jackson said, during a private memorial service at Rainbow Push Coalition headquarters in Chicago, that “[Y]esterday, I listened for several hours to three United States presidents who do not know Jesse Jackson.”

He continued,

“He maintained a tense relationship with the political order, not because the presidents were white or black, but the demands of our message, the demands of speaking for the least of these — those who are disinherited, the damned, the dispossessed, the disrespected — demanded not Democratic or Republican solutions, but demanded a consistent, prophetic voice that at no point in time ever sold us out as people. And it speaks volumes about who the Rev. Jesse Jackson was.”

Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Joe Biden all used their eulogies to attack the President and his policies, though, as you might have guessed, Harris was the most obnoxious and made the least sense. “Let me just say I predicted a lot about what’s happening right now,” Harris smirked. “I’m not into saying I told you so but we did see it coming.” I’d love to ask her what it was exactly that she “saw coming.” The forceful repudiation of the weak, zombie administration she was part of? The voters’ rejection of her embarrassing DEI candidacy? Her running mate’s utter disgrace and exposure as a corrupt hack?

Jackson’s was a subtle and measured rebuke, so subtle and measured that most of the Axis media felt it necessary to ignore it. Many, realizing how inappropriate it was for Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to turn attention away from Jackson’s father and onto their hatred of Donald Trump at Jesse Jackson Sr.’s funeral, also worked to hide the Democrats’ nauseating conduct from the public…after all, there’s an election coming!

Daryl Hannah Asks, “How Can ‘Love Story’ Get Away With” Portraying Her As A Villainous Creep? Simple: Hollywood Has No Ethics, And Never Had Any.

Poor Daryl.

Nobody apparently told her about the industry she worked in for all those years. In an angry op-ed in the New York Times (gift link), Hannah, once one of the late John F. Kennedy Jr.’s girlfriends, protests that the FX TV series “Love Story” about the romance between John-John and Carolyn Bessette exploits her while warping the truth and marring her reputation.

“The actions and behaviors attributed to me are untrue,” Hannah writes. “I have never used cocaine in my life or hosted cocaine-fueled parties. I have never pressured anyone into marriage. I have never desecrated any family heirloom or intruded upon anyone’s private memorial. I have never planted any story in the press. I never compared Jacqueline Onassis’ death to a dog’s.”

I believe her, maybe, but it doesn’t matter. Fictionalized versions of living people’s lives, when those people are celebrities, are immune from lawsuits unless they can be shown to have represented the falsehoods as true (by definition, a fictionalized series does not do that), and done so with malice. One of the show’s producers explained why Hannah’s character was cast as a villain: “Given how much we’re rooting for John and Carolyn, Daryl Hannah occupies a space where she’s an adversary to what you want narratively in the story.” Oh. Then its all right to show her doing and saying things she didn’t do or say.

Personal Taste Ethics

In a Sunday post on Powerline, Scott Johnson, an unrepentant Hall & Oates fan, begins a review of a recent John Oates concert by writing, “John Oates is one-half of what is generally recognized as the most successful duo in music history.” And thus did he fall into the eternal trap awaiting those who state matters of personal taste as fact.

I’ve fallen into it myself. It is hard not to: once your mind has locked itself into an opinion about what is “best” and what/who/where is better than whatever/whoever/wherever, confirmation bias takes over, and objective thought is nearly impossible.

Johnson was, as I knew the second I read that sentence, dragged to the metaphorical woodshed by his readers. Wrote one, in the second comment on the post, “John Oates is one-half of what is generally recognized as the most successful duo in music history? Maybe by sales. But in terms of their work, let me introduce you to the music of Simon & Garfunkel. Then the Everly Brothers. Then the Carpenters. Then Ike & Tina Turner.” Another wrote, “My guess is that Scott included that appraisal just to raise some feathers.
‘Maybe by sales.”‘Actually, I’d guess that the first three you mention sold way more records than Hall and Oates. Musically speaking, my candidate for the most successful duo might be Steely Dan, which, for most of its tenure, was really the duo of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker with various backing musicians.”

Next came this: “Yes to Simon and Garfunkel. Yes to Phil and Don. No to the Carpenters and heck no to Ike and Tina.”

Now in my case, and by my tastes, I would rank Simon and Garfunkle way ahead of Hall and Oates, and the Everly Brothers as well. No, of course The Carpenters aren’t in the same league, though Karen Carpenter was the greatest vocalist ever to sing with any rock or pop duo. Another group didn’t last as long, and perhaps this is because my college room mate played their Greatest Hits album day and night, but I rank the Righteous Brothers ahead of Hall and Oates as well.

Such absolute verdicts also risk being incomplete and ill-informed because of bias blindness. I wondered about another duo who made their mark in the decidedly uncool genre of “easy listening” music, but they were damn good, and lasted a long time. The piano duo Ferrante & Teicher recorded over 150 albums, were fixtures on the variety TV shows of the Fifties and Sixties, and sold over 90 million records worldwide during their career. From the 1950s until they retired in 1989, they earned 22 gold and platinum records, dwarfing the output of both Hall and Oates and Paul and Artie.

You have to admit, as that video of them playing one of their biggest hits, “The Theme From Exodus,” the piano boys did what they did as well as it was possible to do it, for a long time, and with a lot of admirers.

Be Proud, Democrats! This Is The Face of Your Party:

Nice! And Carville speaks for if not all, a majority of the Axis. I defy anyone to justify this with facts and logic as opposed to an appeal to emotion. There is no justification, and Carville’s party’s determination to make hatred for the nation’s elected leader viral and controlling of our nation’s fate and policies is ethically indefensible.

Nor do I care to hear protests that Carville is an outlier. A showboat, yes, but he is expressing exactly what the American Left has allowed to sustain its agenda. Hate. Ugly, corrosive, irrational, destructive hate. We saw the antics of Democrats during the State of the Union, and it was only a slight escalation of Speaker Nancy Pelosis despicable conduct during Trumps 2020 SOTU. The democrats are all Carvillized. Some just hide it better than others.

Amazingly, most of the hate is rooted in bitterness and bad sportsmanship. Democrats lost power because they proved themselves dishonest, corrupt and incompetent…and their reaction to losing is anger? Fury? Hatred of the man who beat them? How juvenile. How embarrassing.

How unethical.

How sad.

Oh Canada! The Government Assisted Suicide/Euthanasia Slippery Slope…

@the.free.press

One out of every 20 deaths in Canada is now caused by the government’s assisted suicide program. What’s even more shocking is how fast the deaths are approved.

♬ original sound – The Free Press – The Free Press

It is reassuring to know, at least for me, that the ethics issues EA has been most adamant about continue to inspire the same analysis from me. On the topic of legal human euthanasia (assisted suicide), the position here hasn’t changed since the policy, now legal in Illinois, California, Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Montana, Maine, New Jersey,New York, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington first began to spread. Gee, I wonder what those states have in common? Oh…right. An ideology that devalues life: that’s today’s progressive movement and its Democratic Party.

This toxic and corrupting culture holds that individual life is not precious, but rather is subordinate to the needs of the many. Letting people kill themselves, or, if necessary, allowing their families and care-givers to let them be killed, costs a lot less than letting the old, sick, depressed and poor try to hold on to every last minute of existence. Masquerading as individual “choice,” the versatile word that encompasses letting mothers snuff out burgeoning young life in their wombs for their convenience and career advancement, the right to have the government kill you quickly metastasizes into a cultural norm where autonomy, courage, fortitude, individualism and reverence for life erodes in the interests of affording a nanny state.

Euthanasia is a straight violation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative; it also, in cases where the object of this kind of “palliative care” is forced on victims, as it frequently is in Canada, a Golden Rule breach. The only ethical system it can be squared with is Utilitarianism, but only of the most brutal kind that was used as the justification for the mass murders under Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

I personally authorized the hospital pulling the plug on my 89-year-old mother when she lapsed into a coma after unsuccessful surgery. My father, who always told us that he would not be a financial or other kind of burden on his family, managed to die during a nap, also at 89, apparently by force of will. My ethical assessment of the Left’s fondness for assisted suicide has been aired frequently on Ethics Alarms, most thoroughly in a series of posts in September of 2019: The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study, Comment Of The Day: “The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study”, and Addendum: To “The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study,” Hypothetical And Poll.

In the first post, I wrote, “I believe that permitting an individual to kill another with the victim’s consent is so ripe for abuse—Dr. Kevorkian comes to mind—that it crosses an ethical line that should be thick, black, and forbidding.  The alleged consent of the doomed can too easily be coerced or manufactured for the convenience of others.” That position hasn’t changed one whit.

Welcome To Unethical Rationalization 31A, “The Hypocrite’s Balm,” or “Any Port in a Storm!”

This is the first new rationalization added to the rationalizations list in a long time, though I have at least two others I have been pondering for a while. Rationalization #31 A, however hit me like Pete Buttigieg’s imaginary maul when a respected legal ethicist wrote on the listserv for the Association of Professional Liability Lawyers today that “Lefties” like him were suddenly embracing state’s rights in response to the need to “resist” President Trump, and attempted to justify this reversal by shrugging, “Any port in a storm!”

And there it was. I could hardly believe that wasn’t on the list already, but it wasn’t. I assigned “The Hypocrite’s Balm” as a sub-rationalization to the infamous #31, The Troublesome Luxury: “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford right now.” I also could have placed it under #25. The Coercion Myth: “I have no choice!,” but it is distinct from both.

#31 stands for brutal Utilitarianism, “the ends justify the means.” #25 is the whine of someone who is too cowardly to make the kind of tough ethical choice that has unpleasant non-ethical consequences. But “Any port in a storm” is the motto of activists who decide that their minds are made up, facts and logic no longer appeal to them, and they are willing to ally themselves with beliefs, organizations, individuals and missions that they have previously reviled in order to avoid admitting they may have been wrong, or that they should reassess their position based on new information, experience, or the metaphorical ice water of reality being thrown in their faces.

Rationalization #31 A describes the warped, desperate and destructive mindset of the Axis of Unethical Conduct today along with the Trump Deranged. So obsessed are they with their hatred of Donald Trump and the fact that he has at least temporarily derailed the Mad Left’s march to single party, nanny state, multicultural, anti-American DEI dominance that they are willing to anchor themselves in “ports” sane liberals would have avoided like ebola in the recent past.

Oopsie! I Forgot To Put Gavin Newsom On the Ethics Villain List!

Let me fix that right away. I knew I would forget someone on that update, but he deserves to be there more than most.

The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, in an appearance in the Presidential primary state of New Hampshire, again used the term “apartheid” to describe Israel. When his interviewer claimed “every expert” had described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide,” Newsome, the epitome a human weasel, said nothing. When called out later on his “apartheid” smear, Newsom said that he was just quoting Axis New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, thus resorting to the rationalization, “Thomas Friedman does it!”When called out on his “apartheid” smear, Newsom said that he was just quoting Axis New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, thus resorting to the rationalization, “Thomas Friedman does it!”

The Democratic himbo also endorses the confiscatory plan pinko Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D. Calif.) have proposed for an annual 5 % wealth tax on billionaires.

Comment of the Day: “’Is We Getting Dummer?’ The Primaries This Week Tell Us ‘Yes’”

Master commenter A M Golden had a stand-out week, with several COTD-worthy posts, including this one, and a Guest Post that arose out of yesterday’s Open Forum.

I am also grateful any time I’m given an excuse to re-post one of my favorite—and, sadly, most relevant—clips from the Ethics Alarms archive.

Here is A M’s Comment of the Day on “Is We Getting Dummer?” The Primaries This Week Tell Us “Yes”:

“Is We Getting Dumber?”

There is some evidence for that. Beyond statistical proofs that we are failing to properly educate generations of students in basic skills, there is a sort of – shall I write it? – malaise about being responsible adults in this country. I don’t know where it came from. Maybe it’s our high standard of living that emboldens it. Maybe is a misapplication of American individualism that has turned into the oft-unethical slogan, “My way or the highway.” It may, in fact, be a broader misapplication of the also oft-unethical slogan, “The customer is always right.” Because, in fact, the customer is not always right.

It is a rationalization that encourages a form of classism (customers consider themselves socially, educationally, financially above the ones who are tasked with serving them), incentivizes unethical behavior, such as fraud, theft, demands for special treatment and, occasionally, results in horrific behavior like sexual harassment, assault and/or battery.

We have started to commoditize large aspects of our lives. Whatever you may say about poorly-educated, biased teachers, there are plenty of good teachers out there who cannot run their classrooms because the administration acts like the store manager who allows customers to abuse the employees under some misguided notion that this is how to run a successful business. The teachers who can teach but are expected to look past misbehavior and abuse while still doing their jobs eventually leave and what are left are the ones who can’t and won’t teach. That’s what happens in a poorly-run business such as the one I described above. Eventually, you have only the employees who don’t care about their jobs.

Some reasons for this lack of maturity and growth include what (commenter) Steve Witherspoon pointed out above – laziness. We have large swathes of the population who can’t be bothered to do very basic things. They are manchilds and womanchilds, prioritizing their shallow wants over their very real responsibilities. Expecting them to pick up a broom and sweep the floor rather than playing four hours of video games per night is tantamount to crushing their souls. Expecting them to be fiscally aware, to save, to monitor spending, means they can’t spoil themselves with destination weddings and pricey vacations.

I am also going to add distraction to the list. Prior to mobile phones, we had to memorize important telephone numbers. Now, there are people who cannot even provide their own numbers without looking them up. The internet and the capabilities of the internet have made brain muscles weak. It has also contributed to the collapse of the work ethic and civility in general. Restaurants routinely have to put up with people on their phones while ordering in person which often leads to miscommunication and to the aforementioned abuse of staff when the order is wrong. Increasing numbers of restaurants will not serve customers until the phone is put down.