The conservative media is foaming at its metaphorical mouth after a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit upheld a District Court decision from last summer that the Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts didn’t violate then-seventh grader Liam Morrison’s First Amendment rights when he was required to remove his “There are only two genders” T-shirt last year.
Liam, no weenie he, was sent home from school in March 2023 after he refused to change into a more neutral shirt. The case was filed on behalf of Morrison and his family last year by two conservative Christian groups, Alliance Defending Freedom and the Massachusetts Family Institute. Sam Whiting, a staff attorney with MFI, reacted to the ruling by saying in a statement, “This case is about much more than a t-shirt. The court’s decision is not only a threat to the free speech rights of public school students across the country, but a threat to basic biological truths.”
The Pazuzu Excuse is an Ethics Alarms term for when someone, often a public figure or celebrity, is caught on video or on a recording saying outrageous, offensive, career-threatening things. With no reasonable excuse at hand, such miscreants often default to claiming that for some reason what came out of their own mouths was not really “them,” and didn’t represent their “true feelings” or beliefs.
You know, like when sweet 12-year-old Regan, possessed by the demon Pazuzu, shouts out to Father Karras, “Your mother sucks cocks in Hell!” in “The Exorcist.”
The Washington Free Beacon reported (this reflects badly on a woke university and its leadership, so you wouldn’t expect the Washington Post to break the story, would you?) that during a Columbia panel featuring the former dean of Columbia Law School, David Schizer, who co-chaired the university’s task force on anti-Semitism and others, Josef Sorett, the dean of Columbia College, and fellow administrators Susan Chang-Kim, the vice dean and chief administrative officer of Columbia College; Cristen Kromm, the dean of undergraduate student life; and Matthew Patashnick, the associate dean for student and family support, listened to the panel discussion while texting each other with snarky, dismissive comments.
Once again, a pile-up on Route Ethics has me doing another Saturday multi-story post. These take twice as long as most posts to prepare, and generally attract less than average traffic and minimal comments. Nonetheless, they are necessary, for me if not anyone else, just to come closer to covering the topic.
2. The D.E.I. Ethics Train Wreck hasn’t stopped yet, Harvard notwithstanding. The University of California, Los Angeles, was accused by a whistleblower of discriminating on the basis of race in violation of California and U.S. law. Black and Latino applicants. it was alleged, are held to lower standards than whites and Asians on exams and other measurements of competence. The dean of the medical school, Steven Dubinett, denied the claims and said that students and faculty “are held to the highest standards of academic excellence.” Hiring and admissions decisions are “based on merit,” not race, “in a process consistent with state and federal law.” Oopsie! Dubinett himself directs a center within the medical school, the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, that includes an illegal a race-based fellowship.
3. More on UCLA: You can read about how far UCLA’s medical school has fallen here. The take-away from the report is that both admissions and graduation standards are being lowered for minorities. One professor claimed that “a student in the operating room could not identify a major artery when asked, then berated the professor for putting her on the spot.” “I don’t know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors,” another UCLA professor said. “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”
What a freak Ethel Merman was! She was 68 when she performed that madly optimistic Anthony Newley-Leslie Bricusse song, one of my all-time favorites (Newley sang it better).
Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced that it will stop requiring a diversity, inclusion, and belonging statement as part of its faculty hiring process. Dean of Faculty Affairs and Planning Nina Zipser announced that the change was made because existing requirements were “too narrow in the information they attempted to gather” and potentially confusing for international candidates. Sure. This is a face-saving explanation, because Harvard’s DEI obsession has lost the staggering school alumni support, donations, prestige and credibility, and also because DEI is a fad that couldn’t stand up to long term scrutiny.
What’s Nakba? It is a pro-Palestinian framing of the forever conflict in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians. Nakba refers to the beginning, when the United Nations announced its two-state resolution of the Palestine conflict with Israel getting one of them, and the Arab states along with the Palestinians attacked the new Israel territory with the objective of making the Israeli state a single Palestinian state. Israel won, and that historical episode is referred to as Nakba, “the disaster,” by the Palestinians.
I view it as the equivalent of the die-hard Confederacy fans in today’s South calling the Civil War “the war of Northern aggression.” It’s a false and biased framing that justifies everything the Palestinians do and try to do to Israel (like wiping it off the map), including terrorism. It is the reverse of the more correct and honest Israeli framing, which is that Palestinians could have had their state in 1948, tried to wipe out Israel instead, and now reside in the mess of their own making.
Soon after Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack (the hostages appear to all be dead by the way, which should have been assumed by now), the Harvard Law Review asked Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School and human rights lawyer, to prepare a scholarly article taking the Palestinian side of the latest conflict. Eghbariah, who has tried landmark Palestinian civil rights cases before the Israeli Supreme Court, submitted one, a 2,000-word essay arguing that Israel’s attack on Gaza following the Hamas act of war should be evaluated through the lens of Nakba, and within the “legal framework” of “genocide.”
Which crucial American institution, our journalism or our education system, has deteriorated more?
This has become an ongoing inquiry at Ethics Alarms. My official participation in either has been sporadic and marginal—no, I don’t consider writing Ethics Alarms journalism—so I cherish commentary by genuine participants. Fortunately we have a lot of teachers, former and current, who weigh in here regularly. For a long time, one regular reader used EA as an assigned class resource. (If there are any journalists out there who visit this site, they haven’t revealed themselves).
As this Comment of the Day by jdkazoo123 demonstrates, insiders in a profession can identify problems with ethical implications that the rest of us on the outside looking in may never consider. Here it is, a reaction to the post, “Ethics Dunce: University of California at Santa Cruz.” ( I also recommend Ethics Alarms special correspondent Curmie’s response to the COTD at that link.)
…
I agree it’s crazy, but there’s a deeper wrong embedded in the stupid wrong–the salary of adjuncts.
Adjuncts are now essential to the functioning of almost all large higher educational institutions, and most small and medium ones as well. The market is saturated with people with PhDs, and they won’t give up the dream of teaching college easily or quickly. This creates a surplus labor force that ostensibly leftwing admins exploit like robber barons. At the same time, a largely leftwing professoriate goes along with it, wringing their hands, gee what could we do?
Just think: these are the people who run the high-priced institutions that are supposed to teach our rising generations critical thinking, logic and life skills.
Would you let this happen?
The University of California at Santa Cruz hired Amanda Reiterman to teach two 120-student lecture classes on classical texts and Greek history. Reiterman who holds a Ph.D. and has taught as a part-time lecturer at the university since 2020, was paid to design the course, do the lectures, and plan the discussion sessions. She recommended a former student of hers who had just earned her bachelor’s degree to be hired as her teaching assistant. Administrators began the hiring process and copied Reiterman…causing her to discover that thanks to a 2022 strike settlement after 48,000 graduate students, postdocs, and researchers in the University of California system walked off thee job to win pay increases and expanded benefits, many teaching assistants are earning more than lecturers, and in some cases, like this one, more than their supervisors and the instructors in their own classes. When Reiterman learned that her teaching assistant would earn $3,236 per month, $300 more than her own monthly pay, she quit. It was not about the money, she told the Chronicle of Higher Education, but the principle. “I felt like I could not teach a class under those circumstances.” Reiterman dropped out as instructor for one class and arranged to teach another class in a different department with fewer students and no teaching assistant.
Brava! No weenie she.
Why did no ethics alarms ring for these administrators? I suspect that when your entire sense of fairness and equity is being mangled and distorted by compensatory benefit theories and DEI cant, little matters like paying a subordinate more than a supervisor with far more experience and credentials just doesn’t resonate the way it once would have, before The Great Stupid spread its dark bat-wings across the horizon, blotting out the sun.
Decades ago, running a foundation where my supervisor negotiated salaries after I decided on who to hire, my first male staff member extracted a higher salary than his equivalent female member on my staff, who had been there longer. I immediately pointed this out to my boss, who agreed to raise the salaries of the women on the staff to the same level. I didn’t even have to argue with him: he knew immediately that it was the only just course.
It’s so disheartening. One has to fight, working in my field, not to conclude, “Not only is a majority of the public cripplingly stupid, ignorant and ethically obtuse, a frightening percentage of those who run our private and public organizations and institutions are also stupid, ignorant and ethically obtuse.” That way despair and madness lies.
Harvard announced that it will henceforth avoid issuing statements about matters that don’t directly affect the core academic mission of the university. That core mission, surprisingly enough, is education, not politics, not social justice, not sucking up to student activists and not virtue-signaling to progressives. “There will be close cases where reasonable people disagree about whether a given issue is or is not directly related to the core function of the university,” the announcement stated. “The university’s policy in those situations should be to err on the side of avoiding official statements.”
The policy will apply to all University administrators and governing board members, as well as deans, department chairs, and faculty councils.
“Individuals within the university, exercising their academic freedom, sometimes make statements that occasion strong disagreement,” the report stated. “When this happens, the university should clarify that they do not speak for the university and that no one is authorized to speak on behalf of the university except the university’s leadership….Because few, if any, world events can be entirely isolated from conflicting viewpoints, issuing official empathy statements runs the risk of alienating some members of the community by expressing implicit solidarity with others,” the statement says.
This sort of thing shouldn’t warrant an Ethics Hero designation, it really shouldn’t. If substantial numbers of public experts, pundits, opinion-leaders and academics were all open-minded, professional, civil, lacking hubris and arrogance, capable of taking criticism without taking it personally—I could go on—Prof. Mayer’s cordial and collegial visit to Ethics Alarms to continue a discussion I began ( a bit more nastily than I should have, but, sigh, that’s me all over) by criticizing a column he authored for that Weekly Reader of daily newspapers, U.S.A. Today, would have been nothing remarkable.
But most of the people I write about here are not like that, and members of our academic bastions particularly these days are simply not in the mood to do what Prof. Mayer has done this week, engaging in good humored and provocative discussions with members of the EA commentariat on this post. This has been a gift to the readers here, and also shows class, guts, respect, humility and confidence.
I still am convinced that the professor is dead wrong about Biden being able to drop out at this stage and not trigger a catastrophe for his party even worse than what it faces by allowing him to run. In fact, I wish I could think of an amusing wager to make with him: maybe he’ll have some ideas.
It has been too long since a Comment of the Day featured Michael West’s commentary; maybe I take his almost always sharp and though-provoking observations for granted. He goes back to 2012, and has graced this blog with 16, 612 comments, many in the course of intense debate.
I genuinely feel for the public educators that are *just* trying to do their jobs and seeing parents fleeing to non-public options and are as frustrated as the parents are about the collapse of public education. A large component of my family are either educators or in direct support of educators and they all are frustrated. However, public education under command of the unions are just one more Democrat money laundering, politician-lobbying and vote-buying scheme as educational bureaucracies bloat like a beached whale.
Ethics Alarms 