Education

The Seventh Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Best of Ethics 2015, Part II

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

DavisHand

The Awards continue (Part I is here)….

Most Important Ethical Act of the Year:

The US Supreme Court’s Decision in  Obergefell v. Hodges in which the Supreme Court considered whether states had to recognize a right to same-sex marriages, and narrowly decided that they must. The prejudice against homosexuality is ancient, deep, and complex, mixed up in confounding ways with morality and religion, and deeply divisive. Nonetheless, I felt that the opinion should have been unanimous; it’s a shame that it was not, but in the end, this will not matter. The result was preordained from the moment gays began coming out of the shadows and asserting their humanity and human rights. Since the Stonewall riot, the nation and the culture has learned a great deal about the number of talented and productive gay men and women in our society and our history, the pain, ostracizing, discrimination and mistreatment they have suffered, and the falseness of the myths and fears that lead to this suffering.  In the end, as Clarence Darrow said about blacks, it is human beings, not law, that will make gays equal. No topic immediately causes such emotional and intense debate, on this blog or in society, as this one, but the Supreme Court’s decision is a major step toward changing the ethical culture, by asserting  that gay men and women have the same rights,  in the eyes of the state, to marry those they love and want to build a life with, and by implication, that the beliefs of any religion regarding them or their marriages cannot eliminate that right.

Outstanding Ethical Leadership

Senator Rand Paul.   I am neither a Rand Paul supporter, nor an admirer, nor a fan.  However, his June filibuster-like Senate speech against National Security Agency counter-terrorism surveillance was a brave, principled,  important act, and a great public service. The point Paul made needs to be made again, and again, and again:  there is no reason to trust the NSA, and no reason to trust the current federal government either. The fact that on security matters we have no real choice is frightening and disheartening, but nevertheless, no American should be comfortable with his or her private communications, activities and other personal matters being tracked by the NSA, which has proven itself incompetent, dishonest, an untrustworthy.

 

Parent of the Year

Tonya Graham

Toya Graham, the Baltimore mother caught on video as she berated and beat on her son in the street for participating in the Freddie Gray rioting and looting. Continue reading →

Craig Mazin, FICK

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments
Craig Mazin, terrible human being and proud of it...

Craig Mazin, terrible human being and proud of it…

The short description of a fick would be “public asshole, and proud of it.” That’s a fair description of the indecent Craig Mazin, a Hollywood writer and producer who has decided to ostentatiously violate the Kantian, Golden Rule, common sense-based ethics of being a college roommate to embarrass Senator Ted Cruz as he runs for President.

I write about a lot of awful people, and often have to explain what’s awful about them. If you don’t immediately see what’s awful about what Mazin is doing, I’m not sure there is much hope for you. There is no hope for him.

Mazin roomed with Cruz during their freshman years at Princeton University, from 1988-1989. Cruz was 18 at the time. This week, apparently spurred by Twitter followers, Mazin began spewing contempt and insults about Cruz, using his “inside” experiences as material and justification.  This, of course, attracted media attention, magnifying the harm to Cruz, although anyone who thinks that conduct by an 18-year-old is a fair or meaningful  way to attack the 46-year-old U.S. Senator he grows into is a per se dim wit. Continue reading →

How Censorship Takes Root: The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association Bans Fun

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

high school fans

The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association has commanded students at high school basketball games to stop taunting, mocking or teasing the opposition, which as I recall was the only reason one attends high school basketball games. The WIAA  has published a guide to sportsmanlike activities, and much of it is reasonable and wise. Not its specific prohibitions for fans, however. The content-specific bans are redolent of campus hate speech bans, but even sillier.They do teach future adult citizens the uses of censorship by authorities, however.

Maybe that’s the idea.

Here are the prohibitions on fan speech and conduct (1-23) and also athlete conduct (24-29) that are identified in the guide (I’ve rearranged them a bit), which means that schools not controlling such conduct sufficiently to satisfy their fun-hating overlords risk official sanctions. The inexcusably censorious prohibitions are in red. The overly strict or general prohibitions are in pink. Continue reading →

Cast Your Vote For The 2015 “Curmies,” Disgraces To The Field Of Education…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Charles Addams

Rick Jones, whose blog has been a past award winner at Ethics Alarms and who is also a much-cherished commenter here, has posted the nominees for his annual “Curmie Awards” (his blog is, after all, Curmudgeon Central.) The Curmies are “presented to the person or persons who most embarrass the profession of educator.”

This time, only one of his nominees were the objects of posts on Ethics Alarms. Following is the list of finalists; then go here to read more of Rick’s riffs on the nominees, and to recoil in horror at Rick’s dishonorable mentions, like the  Texas high school that “not only painted Christian zealotry on the corridor walls, they used made-up quotations from the likes of George Washington and Ronald Reagan to do it.” (I’m really sorry I missed that one.)…

1. …Gustine ISD in Texas, where Principal Alan Luker faced a rather unique problem: someone was leaving feces on the gym floor. So, naturally, a couple dozen 4th and 5th graders were carted off to separate rooms for girls and boys and made to drop their pants….

2. … Harrisburg (PA) Sci-Tech High School, where an (of course) unnamed Assistant Principal threatened senior Alexus Miller-Wigfall with suspension for wearing a dress that was “too revealing” to prom…apparently motivated by the fact that Ms. Miller-Wigfall has “more boobs than other girls,” who “have less to show.” (More boobs? Two aren’t enough for this girl?) [Ethics Alarms post here.]

3.…The State Education Department in Florida, which devised a testing apparatus whereby students who got perfect scores on a standardized test actually hurt their school and their teacher by not improving on the previous year’s perfect score. How often does this happen? Actually, tens of thousands of times annually. Yes, there’s a provision that allows districts to correct the record, and indeed the problem might have been fixed by now, but the mere fact that the default position was to punish teachers and schools for not improving on perfection tells us everything we need to know about the corporate-driven lunacy that now infests public education. [ I omitted this initially, finding it so incomprehensible that I, I don’t know, thought Rick was having a stroke or something. He assures me it’s real.]
Continue reading →

Believe It Or Not, There Is Good News On The Campus Speech Front

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

greenlighThe Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reports that  less than half of America’s colleges maintain policies that severely restrict students’ right to free speech, an all time low since the campus speech defending non-profit started tracking the problem.

Spotlight on Speech Codes 2016: The State of Free Speech on Our Nation’s Campuses reports on policies at 440 of America’s largest and most prestigious colleges and universities.

The report tells us that…

  • The percentage of red light schools has declined from a high of 75 percent in 2007, while in the same time period the number of green light institutions has grown from just eight institutions (2 percent) to 22 this year (5 percent).

This welcome news is especially surprising given the explosion of administration capitulations to student demands for restrictions on campus expression deemed “offensive” or “hostile” to minorities. In fact, I wonder how much of the report was complete before Mizzou Madness. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Nazi Scientist

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments
Scientist, genius, Nobel Prize winner, Nazi. Now what?

Scientist, genius, Nobel Prize winner, Nazi. Now what?

Konrad Lorenz, 1903-1989 ,  was an acclaimed Austrian zoologist regarded as the founder of modern ethology, which is the study of animal behavior. His research  explained how behavioral patterns may be traced to through evolution,  and he made major contributions to the study of aggression and its roots. Lorenz shared a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973 with the animal behaviorists Karl von Frisch and Nikolaas Tinbergen.

It seems that documentation surfaced proving that Lorenz joined the Nazi Party in 1938, however, and for that, Austria’s Salzburg University last week posthumously stripped him of his honorary doctorate.

Your Day Before The Night Before Christmas Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz is…

Is this the right thing to do?

Continue reading →

Oh, Fine, And I Already Burned My Diploma: Harvard Apologizes For The “Holiday Placemats for Social Justice”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Well, that was fast! Good for Harvard, and good for Idrees M. Kalhoon…

apology Harvard

I wonder when all those other colleges and universities are going to apologize?

No, the letter isn’t perfect: the issue isn’t that the placemat confused the community, unless the deans mean that students were confused because they thought they were attending a university that was above this kind of nonsense. Actually, I doubt many were confused at all, and correctly concluded that Harvard, having already inflicted upon itself the idiocy of an Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, was getting exactly what such authorities deliver: politically correct, leftist indoctrination.

Well, I guess the deans couldn’t say, “This embarrassed our entire institution, and we will be throwing all the hacks responsible for this monstrosity into the Charles River at 3:00 PM, tomorrow. Cucumber sandwiches and mulled wine will be served.”

(Though I wish they had…)

It’s gratifying to know the “feedback” (“ARE YOU KIDDING ME? IF YOU DON’T RETRACT THAT CRAP AND BURN THOSE STUPID THINGS IN 24 HOURS, THERE ARE GOING TO BE SOME NEW DEANS AROUND HERE, CAPICHE?” Sincerely, The Harvard Board of Overseers.) was sufficient to prompt a quick retraction, and especially gratifying to know that the nation’s flagship private college still embraces the mission of nurturing “independent minds.”

Now maybe it will examine whether a grossly unbalanced ideological culture on campus is a rational way of doing that.

Ethics Quiz: The Indecipherable Indoctrination

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

calligraphy

In the Augusta County School District in Virginia, Riverheads High School teacher Cheryl LaPorte assigned students the task of coping the shahada, the  Muslim statement of faith, “there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” The purpose, LaPorte explained, was to give the students a sense of the calligraphy and art required in Arabic writing as part of the curriculum in the school’s world geography course.

Not surprisingly given the timing of the exercise, chaos soon reigned. One parent expressed alarm at the assignment, called two friends, and they called two friends, and then before you could sing “allahu akbar” ( the lyrics in a proposed audience sing-along that another high school teacher placed in a “holiday program” to the shock of many students and parents), there was a parents’ meeting, in which Augusta County parent Kimberly Herndon protested, “if my truth can not be spoken in schools, I don’t want false doctrine spoken in schools; ” anonymous threats; and this statement of support from the school district for LaPorte, denying  that the teacher was attempting to indoctrinate students into the Muslim faith:

“Neither these lessons, nor any other lesson in the world geography course, are an attempt at indoctrination to Islam or any other religion, or a request for students to renounce their own faith or profess any belief.”

Then the district decided to close all of its schools…just to be on the safe side. Great assignment, Cheryl!

Your Week Before Christmas Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz today is...

Was the assignment unethical, naive, or legitimate?

Continue reading →

The Social Justice Talking Points Placemat: Harvard Finally Snaps

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

placemat

You will note that I have effectively resisted the temptation to excessively mock Yale for its embarrassing anti-free speech assaults, racial spoils games and political correctness bullying outbreak. Princeton, Dartmouth and Brown have also been disgraced by their students, faculty and administrators of late, but among the Ivies, my family’s favorite university (my parents even met and fell in love in The Yaahd) has pretty much avoided major humiliation, though the Law School had a silly dust-up over its seal and there is an ongoing controversy over black tape. I knew that if their other elite institutional colleagues were going nuts, it was only a matter of time before Harvard joined the loony parade, and sure enough, Harvard has a float.

In some ways, it’s worse than anything its rivals have come up with yet.

This sounds like an Onion parody, or maybe a stunt by the Harvard Lampoon. I’m still hoping it is: the Lampoon of old would do things like this. Harvard’s Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (Wait:  Harvard really has such an office? ARRRRRGHH!) distributed what it calls “Holiday Placemats for Social Justice” (How can anyone say that with a straight face? PLEASE let this be a Lampoon hoax!) to the freshman dining hall and a few upper class dining rooms to guide students through political and social policy conversations when they return home for Christmas break. (Does this remind you of the Obama administration’s directives to good little progressives about pushing Obamacare over the holidays? This is now the progressive way.)

The placemat presents talking points ( I still can’t believe I’m writing this) for students having discussions about controversial topics such as “Black Murders in the Street,” “House Master Title,” and “Islamophobia/Refugees.”

You know, when I was student, I guarantee such an insulting attempt at indoctrination would lead to a bonfire. Continue reading →

Update: Some Perspective On Justice Scalia’s “Racist” Question About Affirmative Action

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments
Big fish, meet small pond...

Big fish, meet small pond…

Ethics Alarms recently discussed the unfair attacks on Justice Scalia, now even extending to calls for his resignation, for his legitimate question in oral argument about whether black students accepted into elite schools via affirmative action might be better off being able to excel in less competitive institutions. The question was not racist, reflecting common sense, nor was it necessarily Scalia’s position, as it was an argument raised in one of the briefs on the case. Never mind: much of the media still characterizes the query as outrageous, and social justice warriors are trying to make the episode out to be smoking gun evidence of Supreme Court bias in anticipation of a negative ruling in the case regarding affirmative action.

As the Daily Beast reveals, however, there is a much better explanation than racism for why Scalia might find the argument powerfully supported by the research of Richard Stander and Stuart Taylor in their book “Mismatch” compelling. Young Nino Scalia was a star in elementary school, but failed the entrance exam for the Jesuit High School in Manhattan. His father told him that he might ultimately be better off at a less competitive school where he could shine, and that’s what happened.  Scalia later graduated first in his class at a less prestigious high school. Then he was rejected again when he applied to Princeton University.  Again he took a step down, attended Georgetown University instead, and was first in his class. Continue reading →