Character

A Inconvenient Question About the Death of Walter Vance

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

"He's everywhere! He's everywhere!"

I have little to add to the tragedy of Walter Vance that can’t be found in the list of 15 Ethics Alarms about failures to rescue that I posted during the recent Penn State discussions. Vance was the shopper who collapsed in a South Charleston, West Virginia Target store during the Black Friday rush and was ignored by dozens of other shoppers, some of whom stepped over his body to seek more bargains. Vance later died.

I do have one little question, though.

I wonder how many of those shoppers who callously reacted to Vance’s peril with indifference told everyone who would listen earlier this month that had they witnessed Jerry Sandusky’s sexual assault on a child in the Penn State showers like Mike McQueary, they would have rushed to the rescue, even if it meant battling Sandusky.

My guess?

Every single one of them.

[More thanks to Rick Jones, who writes about the Vance episode here, and nudged me to comment on it too.]

The SAT Cheating Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Over at Curmudgeon Central, Rick Jones appropriately eviscerates the Educational Testing Service for its role—the role being negligent facilitator–in an unfolding scandal involving students cheating on their SATs by having surrogates take their tests. 20 people have been arrested thus far as either the fake test-taker of the fraudulent scholar paying for said test-taker, and Rick’s guess that there must be a hundred times the ETS’s estimate of 150 incidents of cheating on the SATs  is extremely conservative. The problem is that the SATs are taken under incredibly lax  security, and Rick reveals something I never would have suspected: if someone is caught cheating after the SAT service investigates, he or she is given a refund and allowed to take the test again—and no college is ever notified! Rick writes…

“…in a just universe, the cretinous yahoos at the CB/ETS who decided on this policy would lose their jobs, have “unethical moron” branded into their foreheads, and be publicly pilloried. Preferably literally.” Continue reading →

The Emma Sullivan Affair: Not Just An Aberration

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Time to double-down.

Yes, it's student-hating teacher Natalie Munroe, back again to remind us that the welfare of our children is no longer guranteed to be the #1 priority for your child's teacher, principal or school board member.

Over the weekend, I managed to ignite a controversy with one sentence I included in my discussion of the ridiculous incident which began when high school student Emma Sullivan tweeted that Kansas Governor Sam Brownback “sucks” and ended with her being called on the carpet for it by her principal. Noting that the incident should have been cut short by the school district administrator telling Brownback’s lackey to stop bullying kids, I wrote,

“But the school district administrator had neither the integrity, courage or common sense to do that, which permitted the fiasco to be passed on to the next spineless incompetent, and which also, I submit, tells us all we need to know about why public education in the U.S. is a disgrace.”

“I disagree with your statement and think it is an unfair generalization!” wrote Michael Boyd. Tim LeVier wrote, “…how many public schools are there in the U.S.? How many students are educated (enrolled) by those public schools in the U.S.? How many “social networking” fiascos have there been? Do the positive situations get the same amount of attention as the negative?”

Obviously, I was insufficiently precise, as both Michael and Tim are solid analysts and deft critics here. I was not suggesting that this one incident proves anything about the U.S. public education system. No one incident in a Kansas high school can prove anything about the system as a whole. I was, however, asserting that the deficits of character, warped priorities and lack of common sense displayed by the administrators in this incident are emblematic of the problems of the educational system as a whole. There are too many incompetents in high places, and too often the priorities of the system lie with staying on the right side of the political structure rather than being concerned about the welfare and development of students. To be broader still, my statement indicated that this is the kind of incident that shows why I believe that we can no longer trust the educational establishment, which has “jumped the shark,” “nuked the fridge”, or any other metaphor you  designate to describe when a profession has lost its moorings to professionalism and ethics. Continue reading →

Five Ethics Lessons from Jerome Cardano (“Who?”), and One More

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Remember his name?

A chance reference in a book I was perusing yesterday reminded me of a fascinating historical figure whom I hadn’t thought about in decades—which still gives me an edge over most people, who have never thought about him at all. He is Jerome Cardano, or, in the Italian version of his name, Gerolamo Cardano, an archetypical Renaissance man from Italy who walked the earth between 1501 and 1576. When I first learned about him those many years ago, his remarkable life didn’t give me any ethical insights because I wasn’t thinking about ethics then. Now, reviewing the facts of his remarkable life, I find that it carries at least five lessons with value for anyone who strives to live in a more ethical culture, and to have his or her own life contribute to making the world a better place.

Lesson 1 : Diligence—Play the hand you are dealt the best you can.

Cardano’s mother attempted to abort him by taking various poisons, but succeeded only in making him unhealthy. He stuttered; he was incapable of sexual relations, and had chronic insomnia, supposedly resulting in an “annual period” where he got little or no sleep for two to three months. He was afflicted at various times with the plague, cancer, dysentery, and many lesser ailments, yet he led a life full of extraordinary accomplishments and adventures, and continued to be active and breathing for 75 years, when most of his class and era died before they reached 45. Continue reading →

Abuse of Government Power+ School Administrator Cowardice = Student Persecution

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Enemy of the State.

Emma Sullivan, an 18-year-old high school senior at Fairway, Kansas’s Shawnee Mission East High School,  went with her class on a field trip to the Capitol and heard Gov. Sam Brownback speak. She tweeted her reactions to her Twitter followers, writing, “just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot”.

The part about making mean comments to the Governor was a lie, but on a scale of believability and damage done, not an especially momentous one. It was adults who turned this unremarkable student tweet into an ethics train wreck in three neat, unforgivable steps.

1. First, some over-zealous hack on the Brownback’s staff saw the tweet and complained to an administrator in the school district. This is a First Degree Ethics Foul. Nothing in Sullivan’s tweet brings it within his, the governor’s or the government’s legitimate concerns. For the staffer to complain was petty, vindictive and mean-spirited. Every second he spent on his vendetta was a waste of taxpayer dollars. Worst of all, he was bringing the power of the government to bear on a teenager for doing nothing more than expressing her opinion, which is that Governor Brownback sucks. I’m sure there have been foreign dictators who would punish a teen for doing no more than telling friends that she doesn’t like him, but I would have thought that someone who works in one of the United States governments would instinctively know that this kind of bullying mind-control isn’t allowed here. I was wrong. Brownback does suck, at least at picking staff. Continue reading →

Can’t Someone Be Appreciated for Being NICE Anymore? Even Michele Bachmann?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Yes, a video of the last Republican presidential candidates debate (in Iowa) shows Rep. Michele Bachmann voluntarily filling the water glasses of her fellow contenders before the event, since apparently the organizers expected them to pour their own. The Horror.

The Huffington Post is sure this is a significant and unseemly display of subservience to men by Bachmann, whose fundamentalist Christian beliefs suggest that she accepts the concept of women submitting to their husbands in the marital relationship. Over at The Frisky, Jessica Wakeman accuses Bachmann of staging the whole thing for the cameras, so she will be perceived as nicer than she really is…and she thinks it gives women a black eye: Continue reading →

Bad Jack’s New Gig

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Would you trust this man?

My NPR segment was live, and predictably shorter than the star of the day, disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who was there, also predictably, to talk about ethics. Isn’t it interesting that when businessmen, lawyers, investment gurus and politicians get caught and go to jail, they always manage to have very profitable epiphanies that make them ethics experts just in time to give them a book or speaking tour deal, since their original lines of work are no longer an option?

Do I believe these changes of heart and values are real? Not for a second. Continue reading →

(Pssst! GOP? Awful Human Beings Are Not Qualified To Be President!)

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Coincidentally, this newt is also a miserable human being...

I suppose that it was inevitable that the “Anyone but Mitt” bloc of Republican voters would eventually give Newt Gingrich a second look. After all, he can put a complete sentence together and stays current on world events. He doesn’t take pride in being inarticulate (like Rick Perry) or think it’s cute not to know a thing about foreign countries (like Herman Cain).  Unlike Michele Bachmann, he could pass a junior high exam in American History; unlike Ron Paul, he doesn’t live in a parallel universe. Newt isn’t bland and weightless, like Rick Santorum, and he doesn’t appear to be a holograph, like Jon Huntsman. He’s obviously smart.

This is all true, and yet Newt is a wretched choice. Not because he has virtually no executive experience (and we should be learning what that means.) Not because in his only extended attempt at filling an important and challenging leadership position when he was Speaker of the House, he squandered a position of strength with ethical misconduct and unrestrained hubris worthy of the House of Atreus.  Newt is unqualified to be president because he is demonstrably an awful human being. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: An Unknown Diner

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

A waiter’s tale from a website called An Orange Box:

The waiter vows vengeance.

Here’s tip to the Faithful: this isn’t the way to convert anybody.

William Aramony and the Fallen Hero Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

As he usually did, the extraterrestrial, mutant, collective or whatever he was William Shakespeare (no human could be that wise) had it exactly right, and a long time ago: “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.” In a dispirited column on the CNN website, obviously inspired by the Paterno debacle, ESPN writer L.Z. Granderson writes that he has become afraid to watch the news, fearing that another of his heroes will be shown to be a fraud:

“And when we find out our gods are not perfect, we’re confused. We don’t know what to do with a storyline where the perceived protagonist is complex. Heroes aren’t supposed to do bad things. That’s what villains are for. So either the good supersedes the bad, or the bad makes it impossible to remember the good. We don’t like it when such duality exists in one person. We don’t want to know our heroes are human.” Continue reading →