Author: Jack Marshall

“Dear Pronoun Problems”…Here Is How I Would Answer The Lament Of A Teacher Whose Attempt to “Create An Inclusive Environment” In Her Class Went Horribly Wrong

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Slate, the pioneering web magazine that once had an interesting balance of commentary, jumped the woke shark long ago; I almost never bother with it any more. It carries an especially annoying Social Justice Warrior family advice column, “Care and Feeding,” whose writer, Doyin Richards, founder of the Anti-Racism Fight Club, is obsessed with “diversity, equity and inclusion.”

A teacher calling herself “Pronoun Problems” wrote in part,

On my first day, in an attempt to create an inclusive learning environment, I passed out an icebreaker worksheet that asked several questions, including preferred pronouns. This ended up backfiring. I live in a blue state, but in a suburban area with plenty of conservatives. It’s not uncommon to see a house with a Trump sign right next to a house with a Black Lives Matter sign. Consequently, while I had plenty of students who answered the question honestly, I also had lots of students who wrote their pronouns as “nor/mal” or “attack helicopter.” I feel like it started things off on the wrong foot. It gave me a negative first impression about some of the students, which I don’t think is a healthy mindset for a teacher. Worst of all, I’m afraid I ended up only creating a more hostile learning environment for my trans and non-binary students. The students didn’t necessarily see each other’s answers, but I basically gave some students a platform to express their transphobic views. After my contract ended, I got hired by a different school district, this time teaching eighth grade. I’m worried that if I give out the same icebreaker worksheet, even more of the students will write transphobic “joke” answers. At the same time, I’m glad I was able to learn the correct pronouns for my students and avoid misgendering them in class. How should I go about this in the future? Should I scold them or call them out? Or should I just grin and bear it for the sake of the students who take pronouns seriously?

The reply from Doyin is what you would expect (it begins, You absolutely did the right thing by creating the icebreaker activity; your only errors were not setting ground rules and not explaining why this is important…”). If you want to read it, it’s here.

My answer would be the following:

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Verdict: ‘Quiet Quitting’ Is Unethical. Next Question?”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

[The caption on perhaps my favorite Charles Addams cartoon reads, “We never could have done it without him.”]

I thought that the essay on “quiet quitting” would spark a good discussion, and when I think that, I’m usually wrong. This time I was right, and among the excellent comments was this Comment of the Day by Tim Hayes, who focuses on the crucial aspect of the issue that I barely touched on at all: the responsibilities of management.

Here is Tim’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Verdict: “Quiet Quitting” Is Unethical. Next Question?”…

***

So, full disclosure, I hate the terminology and discussions around “quiet quitting”, both as a manager, and as an employee. Part of this is because it is unethical – but also part of it is because a lot of current discussions seem to be about deflections and doublespeak, and they just frankly aren’t doing anyone any good.

Some instances of quiet quitting are simply laziness on the part of the employee – this shouldn’t surprise us (I can make a strong argument that laziness when possible is actually a biological predisposition, and furthermore beneficial to societies when channeled appropriately), and while performing excellently is a virtue, and should be a path to success, it is not a necessity in all things. The American experiment, and indeed all civilizations (Western and Eastern), have gotten along just fine with the majority of individuals being mediocre – the trick has historically lay in defining mediocre as still sufficiently productive to support a society when the majority of its members are at that level, while allowing those who wish to perform exceptionally to do so. So, in the situation where quiet quitting is about laziness, the only major question to be answered is what constitutes acceptable levels of performance in the role at hand, and have those been adequately defined and communicated to the person in that role.

This is why I hate hearing the discussions as a manager – they almost always ignore that there is a failure of leadership/management in these cases. If I have someone who is performing the job as I’ve described it to them, and is actually meeting my set standards for acceptable levels of performance, yet their performance of their responsibilities is insufficient in some way, then it is axiomatic that I have failed to define as acceptable the levels of performance that are sufficient to fulfill my need. If, conversely, I have described acceptable levels of performance and the person is not meeting them, and so my business needs are not being met, than I am failing to hold this person to the standards I have set. Continue reading →

The Tuition Debt Forgiveness Fiasco So Far…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

President Biden announced last week that he will unilaterally forgive $10,000 in student debt for those making less than $125,000 annually. Pell Grant recipients will receive $20,000 in debt repayment funds if their income is below the $125,000 threshold. Administration officials claim that no individual or household in the top 5% of earners get any financial assistance from the program.

Well….

1. As we have learned to expect from the administration that was supposed to be a breath of fresh air after all those Trump lies, we cannot get an honest statement of what the Biden loan forgiveness vote-buying scheme will really cost. The official number has been $300 billion. The National Taxpayers Union Foundation issued an analysis earlier this week estimating that the student loan erasure will add nearly $330 billion to the deficit over the next decade. The Committee for a Responsible Budget puts the cost of the handouts at between $440 billion and $600 billion. The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business estimates that the program will cost up to $1 trillion. Biden’s paid liar and unofficial village idiot (but she’s the first village idiot to be “of color, female, and a lesbian, and that’s what counts), White House Press Secretary Jean-Pierre, explains with her typical precision, “All of this as when it comes to costs will also depend on how many of the loans canceled were actually expected to be repaid.”

What do we call organizations that commit to a huge expense without knowing what it will cost…

2. …Or how it will be paid for? Administration officials say the program is “fully paid for” through “deficit reduction,” as the government will be spending less money that it did when it was leaking trillions in ad hoc federal spending to combat the Wuhan virus. Thus we are hearing doubletalk like this, from Bharat Ramamurti, the deputy director of the National Economic Council (and he is, I believe, the first deputy director of the National Economic Council of Indian descent!):

Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Censorship At Northwest High

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I wrote editorials for my high school newspaper. The administration got quite annoyed with me for several of them, particularly the one that exposed the fact that the students in the “accelerated learning” program were often not disciplined for the same offenses that got other students suspended. (Also annoyed with me was my best friend at the time, who almost immediately got suspended as the school decided to prove there was no favoritism to the the best students (though, of course, there was). Still, nobody ever threatened to shut down the paper based on its content.

Then again, our paper never published anything about sex….

The students on the staff of the school paper at Northwest High School in Grand Island, Nebraska were ordered by administrators to use the names they were given at birth for their bylines because using their “preferred names”—apparently three of the students were transgender, whatever that means now— was too controversial.  In defiance, the student journalists dedicated an  issue to LGBTQ. issues, with two columns on the topic and a news article about the origins of Pride Month. The school responded by ending the newspaper entirely. The paper had been in print for 54 years at Northwest High, which has about 700 students and is the only high school in Grand Island, a small city about 95 miles west of Lincoln, the state capital.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Was shutting down the newspaper an ethical move by school administrators?

Continue reading →

Verdict: “Quiet Quitting” Is Unethical. Next Question?

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I had happily never heard of the term “quiet quitting” until last week, and now it is supposedly a hotly-debated ethics topic. There’s nothing to debate about. “Quiet quitting” is not new (the term may be new), nor is there any defense for it. It is un-American to its core. But as so many American values are being eroded by revolutionary fervor of people who simply don’t like the unique history, culture and principles that make the nation the unique entity that it is, it figures that slacking at one’s job and being self-righteous about it would be on the rise.

It is, there is little doubt about that. Ethics Alarms has mentioned the trend of increasingly poor and unaccommodating service in every sector. The usual explanation is the under-staffing that the destructive pandemic lockdown facilitated, but it’s good that focus is falling on the declining belief in seeking excellence in all one does, and putting out one’s best effort at all times. The death throes of American dedication to excellence as a cultural value is what has been newly christened “quiet quitting,” the many ways in which workers reduce the time, energy, and care they commit to their jobs.

Continue reading →

New Week Dawning Ethics Warm-Up, 8/29/2022: It’s Bernie Sanders Appreciation Day!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Before it is too far back in the rear view mirror, I must mention yesterday’s place among ethically momentous dates for both good and ill.

Most significantly, the ill comes to mind: it was on August 28 in 1955—the same date represented in “Back to the Future” as a time of innocence and naivete—that Emmett Till, a Black teen , was abducted from his uncle’s home in Money, Mississippi, by two white men after a white woman told her husband that he had whistled at her and brushed against her. The boy was brutally murdered, and his death has remained an iconic symbol of Jim Crow and American racism to this day. Also on the dark side of ethics, in 1968, police and anti-war demonstrators battled on the 28th in the streets of Chicago as the Democratic National Convention nominated Hubert H. Humphrey for President despite a popular upheaval seeking a peace-seeking alternative to the Lyndon Johnson administration. In my assessment, that rioting was far, far more threatening to the U.S.’s confidence in the health of its democracy than the antics of the middle-aged clowns who swarmed over the Capitol on January 6, 2020. Less earth-shattering but still the culmination of an ethics train wreck, on yesterday’s date in 1996 the 15-year marriage of Britain’s Prince Charles and Princess Diana officially ended. The ethics lesson is how important it is for leaders and admired role models to live up to the best standards of conduct, and when they don’t, the institutions they represent suffer, sometimes irreparably.

There is at least one shining ethics milestone to salvage August 28: in 1963, more than 200,000 people heard the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., which includes the perplexing statement his followers today want to wish away: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

1. Wait; corporal punishment is still allowed in public schools? Tell me again: why do we have a Department of Education? About 70,000 public schoolchildren were abused with corporal punishment in the 2017-18 school year, which is the most recent year for which federal data is available. Nearly 4,000 schools reported using corporal punishment during that school year, and as children head back to classrooms, some teachers are dusting off their paddles. So I guess there were some positive aspects to remote schooling.

No wonder school boards assumed that parents would be supine in the face of critical race theory and transsexual propaganda, if they allow teachers to beat their children.

2. For today’s depressing example of the quality of reason, rhetoric and argument employed by high elected officials, I give you…Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont! Asked by ABC “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos about complaints that Biden’s $300 billion giveaway to students owing payment on their student loans, Sanders’ replied, “I don’t hear any of these Republicans squawking when we give massive tax breaks to billionaires!” Yeah, and they don’t complain about the designated hitter, either!

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: The Denver Public School System

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Oh yeah, our public school students are in the very best of hands.

Get this:

A video called “Don’t be a Bystander: 6 Tips for Responding to Racist Attacks,” was shown to Denver South High School students in their classes. The film explains that “in our current political moment, White supremacists and White nationalists have been emboldened, and as a result, public attacks are on the rise.”  Those tips for responding to “racist attacks” include do “not call the police” because it “escalates, rather than reduces” violence.  You see, “police have been trained to see people of color, gender-nonconforming folks, and Muslims as criminals, they often treat victims as perpetrators of violence. So, if the victim hasn’t asked you to call the police, do not — I repeat, do not — call the police.”

Apparently some parents had a problem with this particularly heinous example of indoctrination. Five law enforcement associations in Colorado also objected  to the video, warning that it would increase “negative perceptions of law enforcement and [hurt] our efforts to build trusting relationships within the communities we serve, including schools and student populations.”

Ya think?

Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Legal Ethicist Stephen Gillers

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

“I don’t think a jury would convict him without proof of harm. I’m not sure I would…It has to be one-hundred-per-cent irresistible as a matter of law. There can be no fact, no event, no piece of evidence that could support any room for ambiguity.” 

—NYU law professor and legal ethics expert Stephen Gillers, reflecting on the chances of conviction arising from an indictment of Donald Trump for violations of the Espionage Act and other statutes making the mishandling classified information a crime.

Gillers’ position is similar to that of Alan Dershowitz, who also said last week that while there appears to be sufficient evidence to charge Trump (based on the heavily redacted affidavit Trump was mocking in his meme above), it would be unwise to do so. It would also be unethical prosecutorial conduct unless there is a significant likelihood that Trump could be convicted. It is unethical to make “the process the punishment,” and Attorney General Garland knows it.

This is why the raid on Mar-a-Largo was suspicious as well as a terrible precedent in the first place. In the absence of any demonstrated urgency, the raid looked like an effort to “mess Trump up a little” by treating him like a drug kingpin or a Mafia crime boss rather than with the deference every other former POTUS has received. This made it political theater rather than legitimate law enforcement, executed by a struggling administration apparently terrified of the previous President and his passionate supporters. Continue reading →

If The Public Cannot Trust Accountants To Be Ethical, Who Can They Trust? Answer: Nobody

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Let’s begin with a confession and an apology. On June 28, the SEC announced that it had charged Ernst & Young LLP with extensive cheating by its employees on exams required to obtain and maintain Certified Public Accountant (CPA) licenses. Moreover the Big Five firm withheld evidence of this misconduct from the Security and Exchange Commission’s Enforcement Division during the SEC’s investigation. EY admitted the facts leading to the SEC’s charges and agreed to pay a $100 million penalty. [You can read the SEC’s press release here.]

I have no idea how I missed such a major and troubling ethics story. It’s my job to keep up on such matters; I teach accounting ethics, though I haven’t had a training assignment for that profession since the pandemic hit. I apologize profusely. I will work to do better. While the various breaches of government, journalism, legal and business ethics that occupy most of my attention on Ethics Alarms are important, none are more ominous than this story. It really feels like the canary dying in the mine.

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “The Little League Cotton Fiasco: Good Job, Everybody! Now U.S. Race Relations Are In Ethics Zugzwang!”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In the Ethics Alarms post about this horrible example of how broken our race-relations are (I believe that the death-spiral was set in motion by Barack Obama, but that’s a topic for another day, when I get to him in the “Worst Presidents’ series), I did not sufficiently focus on one of the most disgusting aspects of the story.

As is usually the case, a reader was ready to remedy the omission. Here is E2’s Comment of the Day on the post, “The Little League Cotton Fiasco: Good Job, Everybody! Now U.S. Race Relations Are In Ethics Zugzwang!”

***

Did it occur to absolutely no one that these are kids and kids do silly things? Emulating a Little League star is basically an innocent thing: expecting these same kids to equate pseudo-cotton balls to slavery and racism is asking more than is fair for their age. These are kids!

So no children can no longer be children, apparently And it is clearly up to the progressives to instill — from birth, I guess — a deep sense of guilt about America’s checkered history. That there many inspiring and admirable aspects to our history  are conveniently forgotten or treated as subordinate to the moral and ethical missteps.

If a kid wore his grandad’s WWII medal would that make him a little warmonger?

Kids live in the day, not in history as adults record and interpret it. And they remain innocent for an astonishingly short period of time. Can’t the Left just allow children to enjoy being kids before they are indoctrinated, brain-washed and turned against their nation and fellow Americans?

I guess not, as long as there are nasty, ill-intentioned, ultra-negative progressive adults out there.