Education

Ethics Quote of the Month: New Mexico Supreme Court Justice C. Shannon Bacon

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“Do you watch the news? Do you listen to the radio? Do you read anything about what’s going on in the world? Because the problem with lawyers relying on AI hallucinations is an above-the-fold story every single day.So either you have buried your head in the sand … and that’s an intentional choice to be uninformed, or you took a gamble, and neither of those are consistent with the code of conduct.”

—-New Mexico Supreme Court Justice C. Shannon Bacon excoriating lawyer Stephen Aarons for submitting a brief riddled with ChatGPT “hallucinations.”

Good for her, but still not strong enough.

Aarons’ brief included references to imaginary witnesses and fake testimony from at least one real witness. That AI bots are likely to make up case cites and even statutory language has been recognized and publicized widely, not just in legal publications but in the general news media since early 2024. Lawyers, including those with large national law firms like Morgan & Morgan and even the Justice Department continuing to file these bogus bot-authored court documents is amazing to me. And they are too stupid, ignorant and lazy to even proof-read what the bots wrote! One judge recently railed specifically at using ChatGPT for legal work, which he compared to using Mad Magazine as a legal reference.

Bacon threw the metaphorical book at Aarons, removing him as attorney from the case of a 60-year-old man convicted last year of murdering his wife, found him in contempt of court, ordered him to pay $5,000 to a client protection fund, and referred him to the bar for potential discipline. The murder appeal will be handled now by a public defender.

It isn’t just lawyers, of course, who deserve tongue-lashings like this. Teachers, professors, newspaper editors, legislators, politicians, screenwriters, and, yes, judges to name just a few of the affected groups have an obligation to keep up-to-date on the AI revolution, and a disturbing number of them are not even close, which is inexcusable.

Two veteran members of Congress, Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. James Clyburn recently indicated that they were ill-informed regarding AI. That this is, frighteningly, not unusual shouldn’t give us any comfort. Lawmakers are notorious for taking an inordinate amount of time to understand new developing technology, as when the late Senator Ted Stevens, while chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, described the internet as a “series of tubes.” Like the internet but perhaps even more so, however, artificial intelligence is a civilization-altering (and perhaps -threatening) phenomenon moving at the speed of light. Those who are too dim, indolent, unimaginative and irresponsible to keep up need to get out of the way and retire to some nice, safe, quiet pursuit like beachcombing or golf.

Oh…it’s the Rules of Professional Conduct, Your Honor, not the “code.” Judges have ethics codes. Lawyers haven’t been governed by a “code” for 40 years.

Try to keep up.

Unethical Quote of the Week: Dr. Kemi Doll

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“I want to be clear that I don’t care whether any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true. None of them were worth his career.”

—-Author Kemi Doll, MD, in a New England Journal of Medicine article this month titled, “Jason Arday and the Perils of Being Black in Academia.”

Can you believe that quote? Astounding, unreal, incredible. (As a side note, what the heck is the New England Journal of Medicine doing publishing an article about a Cambridge University scamster given a position on the faculty based mostly on his color and secondarily on his transparently fantastic biographical claims and stolen scholarship?)

Doll’s statement literally stands for the elimination of integrity, merit, honesty and accountability as core standards of Western civilization, replacing them with…what, exactly? Feelings? Artificial virtue? Group-based advancement?

I suppose this chart…

.

..helps explain how a medical journal author would write such crap, but it doesn’t explain what overdose of cracked ideology, indoctrination, group-think and incipient brain rot was necessary to get us to this point.

As I have already written here a few times, I am sick of the Arday story, but we cannot be sick of what it signifies because it is too important to ignore. As Glenn Greenwald wrote, “One cannot honestly defend Arday either for his deceptions or his apparent suicide. And, in fact, no one really is. What the protesters and petitioners are doing is defending themselves. University administrators, professors, writers, and other liberals are out in the streets screaming at the press for revealing the depths of elite academia’s racism, gullibility, and dishonesty. They’re focusing on the media to take themselves out of the spotlight.”

Bingo.

Comment of the Day: “Making Ethics Sense of the Jason Arday Saga”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Ryan Harkins contributed the second Comment of the Day to grace EA’s cyber-pages today, and like the earlier one by Humble Talent, it is excellent. Since the topic is Jason Arday, I believe I am allowed to give a brief update on this latest story of the academic world’s DEI disgrace:

  • In a substack essay, Max Klinger wrote about his experience in the Cambridge department that later hired Arday for its faculty. He wrote in part, “I studied in the academic department at Cambridge that later employed Jason Arday. Here’s just some of the crap I learned: For one module, I wrote a lengthy essay about how cultural products like kids’ cartoons and jazz songs serve as instruments of capitalist oppression. I got a top mark on that paper (despite knowing at the time that I was essentially regurgitating complete crap).While studying for another paper I had a debate with the professor, an eminent anthropologist, because she insisted that native tribes could fly through the trees – not metaphorically, but that they could literally fly because they believed they could fly. After all, who are we to question ‘indigenous ways of knowing’…For a different course, I read long ‘research papers’ which argued that the fact that black kids are excluded from schools more than white kids proves systemic racism exists in education. Crucially, they ignored the fact that white kids are excluded more than, e.g., Japanese kids, a statistic which, applying the exact same logic, would suggest that the education system is systemically biased in favour of, erm, Japanese kids (which obviously it isn’t)…”
  • The United States Mission to Belgium, under U.S. Ambassador Bill White, released a statement condemning Ghent University for retaliating against the American scholar who blew the metaphorical whistle on Arday’s plagiarism. “The United States government regularly funds and supports research, academic exchanges, and other engagements with overseas universities,” it said in part. “Dishonest, corrupt institutions that engage in, or reward, scapegoating mob behavior are not desirable partners for us. This is particularly true where the purpose and effect of the scapegoating is to punish accurate journalism unearthing academic dishonesty. We are therefore reviewing any relationships we have with Ghent University.” Good. No Democratic administration would do this, and you know why.
  • So far, there has been no report on what was Arday’s cause of death. Everyone assumes he took his own life, but no information has been forthcoming on how, if indeed he did. I find that strange. But then everything about this sad tale is strange.

Now here’s Ryan Harkins’ Comment of the Day on the post, “Making Ethics Sense of the Jason Arday Saga”:

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Sorry! A Jason Arday Ethics Train Wreck Update Because Attention Should Be Paid

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There should be lots of topics to discuss on today the Friday Open Forum, which is going up next, but first, despite having promised to never post on the nauseating Jason Arday mess again, events dictate that I have to break that promise, because not doing my job regarding the EA mission would be more unethical than breaking a promise based on a premise that turned out to be false. It’s an ethics conflict. (I wonder why MAGA types have so much trouble with the concept. President Trump has delivered on a higher percentage of his campaign promises than any President since James K. Polk, and yet defectors like Tucker Carlson and Margery Taylor Greene—who would want to be a member of that club?— are furious because he started a necessary war that should have been started about 50 years ago. Morons.)

But I digress. Over in Europe, which stands as a frightening example of how quickly cultures can lose core values, Nathan Cofnas, who was the first to extensively expose Arday an academic fraud, announced that he has been suspended by Ghent University in Belgium and expects to be fired. His offense? “Discrimination”—-meaning that pointing out that a black academic star that Cambridge University had created out of DEI nothingness was in truth a serial plagiarist was racist. The school rector, Petra De Sutter issued a statement on l’affaire Arday asserting that freedom of speech “is not unlimited. It goes hand in hand with responsibility and may be restricted in order to protect the rights of others.”

Tell us more about the freedom to lie to the public and jump in line in front of genuine scholars because of one’s color, Petra!

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Now THIS Is Indoctrination

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Oregon State University mandates that undergraduates complete two courses on “Difference, Power & Oppression,” as part of its “Core Education” curriculum, including “Difference, Power & Oppression Foundations” and “Difference, Power & Oppression Advanced.”

The university demands that all students take these courses so students can master the art of disrupting oppressive systems in the United States and around the world. After all, the Orwelians explain, “The inequitable distribution of social, economic, and political power in the United States and globally is sustained through systems of oppression, which represent a variety of discriminatory institutional beliefs and practices…beliefs and practices [that] obscure the origins and operations of systemic oppression in daily life, such that this inequitable power distribution is assumed to be the natural order…Such examinations will enhance and promote responsible, ethical, and anti-racist engagement by preparing students to understand and disrupt these systems as they manifest in their field.”

There is no way to spin this. Oregon State, a public university, is requiring any graduate to have their brain washed in order to graduate and get a degree. There is also no way to defend it, or the oppressive and anti-American ideology that has spawned such totalitarian tactics.

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On Plagiarism…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Guest Column by Michael R.

[Introduction: This comment by Michael R, in response to the Jason Arday post, “On The Left’s Horrifying Lack Of Integrity In The Wake of The Arday Scandal: I’m Sorry I Was So Right, And How I Wish I Were Wrong. Now What?” is sufficiently extensive and covers such an umortant ethics issue that I deem it worthy of a Guest Column. He begins by referencing the “Everybody Does It” attempted exoneration of the late Cambridge fraudster Facebook post that was favored on the platform by my old friend, a history professor who should know better but who is apparently completely woke-blinded…]

To your long-time Georgetown history professor, you can reply that all he has done is demonstrate why the left has lost all credibility. He thinks he is showing how it is fine to plagiarize. All the has shown is that those institutions no longer care about academic rigor and have no credibility.

Now about the plagiarism. There are different grades of plagiarism. Let me explain why the current round of plagiarism is so devastatingly bad.

When I was in grad school, many of us were asked to carefully check the introduction chapters of foreign students’ dissertations. Because of the difficulty of writing in a foreign language and the differing intellectual property standards in different cultures, there was a lot of plagiarism and the advisors were very careful to detect it and get it corrected before the defense. This is a mockup of a typical Asian student’s introduction.

“Poorly worded original sentence. Sentence directly copied from source 1. Two sentences directly copied from source 2. Poorly worded original sentence tying the thoughts together.Four sentences from source 3. One sentence from source 1. One sentence from source 4. A poorly worded original sentence tying them together. Rinse and repeat.”

You can see what is going on. They lack the English language skills to really blend the thoughts from the different sources together, so they just copy whole sentences (occasionally paragraphs) from many sources and tie them together with some original sentences. This is plagiarism, but this is pretty easy to fix. They are writing a typical intro, they just aren’t doing the paraphrasing and integration of the ideas needed. We would work with the students to get this fixed so that there weren’t any problems. There are probably a lot of programs that didn’t do this, resulting in a massive amount of plagiarism. I am fairly sure this is pretty common in dissertations, especially the Introduction chapters (which are typically reviews of the literature and not original research).

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The Legal Profession’s Corrupting Partisan Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

That chart represents the relative number of employees, including lawyers, in the largest U.S. firms to contribute to Republicans. I have written several posts about the “ideological capture” of major U.S. professions and institution, and opined that the extreme progressive bias in the legal profession is among the most threatening to U.S. society and democracy itself. Two examples are here and here.

Right now the D.C. Bar is fighting with the Justice Department over the Trump administration requiring some major law firms to demonstrate that they are not biased against the President and his policies, an effort the Axis (and the D.C. Bar’s staff) calls making them “bend a knee.” The major law firms are biased against this President and his administration, and are increasingly willing to show it. The civil justice system will not work if the legal profession is politicized. Increasingly, it is.

The reason is pretty clear: the vast majority of law schools have almost no conservatives or Republican on their faculties, and my alma mater, Georgetown University Law Center, is typical of the top tier law schools. You can peruse GULC’s disturbing EA dossier here.

So Many Unethical Quotes, As The Jason Arday Ethics Train Wreck Picks Up Steam

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I really didn’t want to post again so soon on this, but the frantic denial and blame-shifting efforts by the Mad Left regarding a disaster of their own making is beyond anything I anticipated, and I anticipated a lot.

Lord Woolley, the principal of Homerton College, Cambridge, said Arday had been subjected to the “most horrendous, toxic, vicious witch hunt” leading to his death. Woolley is supposed to be a scholar. A witch hunt describes an effort to pin vile deeds on a victim who is innocent of such deeds. Arday did exactly what he was accused of doing, and he was in the process of being appropriately held accountable for what he did. Cambridge was also appropriately criticized and condemned, and will continue to be.

Today, Lord Woolley said: “We need an investigation into the media onslaught, the vicious media onslaught.” It’s called journalism, you dolt. For once, the left-biased news media did its job and exposed a DEI fraud as well as the institution that betrayed its standards, students and reputation by promoting and defending him. This is rich: the Left wants to investigate its captive news media for reporting the truth.

The hilariously named “Good Law Project” got thousands of idiots to sign an open letter. I’ll bold the most insane parts. It reads,

We, the undersigned, are appalled by the sustained and malicious attacks on the academic integrity of Professor Jason Arday.

Entirely false allegations of plagiarism were made against Professor Arday and referred to two universities. Investigations have found no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing. The relevant academic journals also found no basis for the claims.

Yet despite these unequivocal findings, rightwing media have attempted to smear Professor Arday’s reputation and undermine his career. That should concern everyone who believes in academic freedom, fairness and due process.

It is difficult to ignore the question of motivation. When a distinguished Black academic is repeatedly subjected to baseless allegations after being fully exonerated, it signals there is an attempt to undermine Black people who hold positions of influence.

Professor Arday, a working class Black man, became the youngest Black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history. His remarkable journey, scholarship and leadership should be celebrated, not overshadowed by campaigns built on allegations that have been comprehensively rejected.

Professor Arday has contributed to public life for many years, building a distinguished record of charitable and community service. This latest smear campaign and the spread of misinformation are deeply alarming – not only because of the impact on one individual, but because of the message they send to aspiring Black and Brown young people who seek to attain positions of leadership.

The demonisation of Professor Arday, and recently on Misan Harriman, risks creating a chilling effect, signalling that success and public service may be met with hostility, misrepresentation, and disproportionate scrutiny.

We stand in unwavering solidarity with Professor Arday. We call on universities not only to defend academic freedom and robust scholarship, but also to confront racism wherever it manifests itself, whether overtly or through persistent attempts to discredit exceptional Black academics.

There can be no place in higher education for campaigns that weaponise baseless accusations to damage reputations and careers. Universities must ensure that excellence is protected and that every scholar is judged on the merit of their work, not the colour of their skin.

Niiiiice! Lies everywhere!

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Update: Addendum to “Making Ethics Sense Of The Jason Arday Saga”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I don’t really want to pat myself on the back for predicting this last night minutes after I learned about the sad finale to the Jason Arday debacle. Anyone who has followed the unethical patterns of the political Left and who is capable of objective thought would have known this would happen.

I wrote,

“You know, don’t you, that the next step will be a tsunami of op-eds and essay criticizing and condemning the conservatives—racists, all of them— who “killed” Arday with their determination to drive a neurodivergent “of color” out of his remarkable position. So he puffed up his resume a little bit— Everybody does it. How else was someone like him to break through the societal barriers white society has erected to impede people like him? I will be shocked if Arday isn’t quickly canonized as a victim. It is the perfect way to deflect attention away from the real issues behind this tragedy.”

I just finished a cup of coffee and two yummy hot biscuits, and saw these:

Morons. Look at the “loves” for the first one, by Sadiq Khan, whoever the hell he is.

It’s early yet. Those op-eds are probably just being finished now. I certainly wasn’t the only one who knew this would be the reaction by many on the Left. Here’s a quote from another “X” post on the topic: “The story that will be spun about Jason Arday will be that his death lies at the feet of the people who called out his serial fabulations for being what they so transparently were…”

One of the Unethical Quotes Of The Week (There Have Been So Many…): Cambridge University Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“In light of the focus on this troubling case [Jason Arday scandal] and the widespread commentary around it, I want to be very clear that we do not need the outcomes of an investigation to clearly and loudly affirm that our staff of colour are highly valued, for their scholarship, their achievements, and the contributions they make to the institution and the wider academic community. This particular case is an aberration and should not be used to cast aspersions on their work or the legitimacy of their roles at Cambridge.”

—-Cambridge University Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice, sounding stupid and making it clear that the investigation Cambridge announced it will be undertaking will be butt-covering exercise and that nothing it uncovers will dissuade the university from its education integrity destruction due to ideological commitment to DEI above all else.

You can read her whole letter here.

She just couldn’t do it! She just couldn’t say that the Jason Arday appointment was a profound embarrassment for Cambridge and obviously represents a breakdown in the University’s standards, values, evaluation and recruitment procedures as well as administration and oversight of faculty, and that serious reforms need to be instituted and will be instituted once an investigation uncovers all the elements of the humiliation for the school the Arday episode represents.

Yeah, we know your “staff of colour” are highly valued, because they are badges of virtue to the DEI cult the educational community has become, symbolizing Cambridge’s conformity, loyalty and commitment. That’s how a sociopathic fraud like Jason Arday got his position in the first place.

The Arday mess is not an “aberration.” It is signature significance. No competent and respectable institution of higher learning hires a faculty member like Jason Arday even once. Eric Rasmussen collected the names and published the bios of the eleven distinguished scholars, professors and administrators who thought hiring Arday would be a boon to Cambridge. They couldn’t have checked his credentials. They didn’t think carefully about his claims which were absurd on their face. They allowed him to be hired because he was “of colour,” and that was what mattered. They should all be fired, but Prentice’s letter proves that 1) that won’t happen and 2) Cambridge’s cultural and ethics rot goes far deeper than just those directly involved.

X-user “Smirkly” posted the most extensive list of the flaming, pulsating red flags in Arday’s claims and performance, and it is impressive:

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