My ethics alarms just don’t ring very loudly on this incident. Maybe yours do.
A pregame trivia video before a Michigan State football game included a photo of Adolf Hitler on the Spartan Stadium scoreboard. (The question asked where Der Fuhrer was born.)
Though I have seen no record of whether there were complaints, the school felt it necessary to issue a profuse apology:
Really? Displaying a photograph of a historical figure who appears in hundreds of movies, is spoofed in multiple comedies and film classics, as part of a bland trivia question (It’s not like the question was about the Final Solution) requires an apology and results in a contract cancellation?
Your Ethics Alarms “Please explain this to the ethicist” Ethics Question of the Day is…
Is this a fair, competent and responsible reaction by Michigan State?
My reaction to the reaction?
- A Nation of Weenies. Ooooh, did the picture of that scary man Hitler makes some students feel “unsafe”? He’s only been dead for almost 80 years…
- This kind of thing greases the slippery slope to censorship. Words are violence, history is violence, photos are violence. Baloney. It’s history. College students should grow up, and college administrators should stop walking on metaphorical egg shells.
- Is Hitler the only one of history’s villains whose picture can’t be displayed in pubic without disclaimer, a trigger warning and the sign-off by a committee? How about General Heydrich? Goebbels? Eichmann? Mao? Richard Speck? The Hillside Strangler? Osama Bin Laden? Voldemort? Robert E. Lee? Thomas Jefferson? Just wait: next Michigan State will be apologizing for displaying a photo of Donald Trump.
- Added: Was the university’s response somehow related to the Hamas support on college campuses? If so, Michigan State just discovered the Streisand Effect. Few would know about the Hitler photo episode without the effusive apology.
The reasonable reaction to the photo would be to ask the company making the trivia quizzes to keep the future content confined to rainbows, lollipops and “My Little Pony” going forward, because Michigan State is breeding students who are afraid of their own shadows.
Ethics Alarms 
Photos of Mao? Che? Yassir Arafat?
A buddy used to joke that the Germans spend a lot of time saying Hitler was Austrian and Mozart was German.
MSU’s response is totally stupid, but indicative of the complete rot in higher education. What a bunch of weenies. As I recall, I’ve seen Hitler’s image shown and spoofed on Spongebob Squarepants. I thought it was hilarious.
It’s sad that MSU’s AD has balls that are smaller than a cartooner named Hillenburg.
I take it back. It’s not sad. It’s pathetic.
It does not offend me nor do I find it unethical. The title to this post cracked me up actually, after I started reading. Lighten up world, life’s way too short.
But, I must question the quizzer’s judgement. Unless you’ve been living with the Unabomber the past couple of weeks, how/why would you ask a Hitler question right now?
Of all the the trillions of trivia questions you could ask? Dumb.
Or was this a very specific topic quiz? Say, Birthplaces of Western Civ maniacal assholes currently residing in hell that unfortunately lived in the 1st half of the 20th century?
I’m glad this happened. It will keep people from discussing the ethics of scored a touchdown with 30 seconds to go and a 42-0 score rather than taking a knee.