Education

Ethically Provocative Quote of the Month: Duval County School Board Member Charlotte Joyce

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“If we don’t do something about this problem, then it could be the demise of traditional public education in Duval County.”

—-Duval County school board member Charlotte Joyce during a recent board meeting, quoted by Politico in “School choice programs have been wildly successful under DeSantis. Now public schools might close. The Republican governor’s school choice programs may serve as a model for other GOP-leaning states across the country.”

I saw that two-day-old story from Politico while web-surfing late last night, and had two immediate reactions: “What a perfect opportunity for Bruce to make an appearance from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood Clip Archive!” and “Good!”

I know nothing about Charlotte Joyce, her political affiliation or her attitude toward public schools, but I do know this: America’s public school system is broken, and was broken deliberately by ideologues who decided that the best way to achieve radical transformation of American rights, society and culture was to use mandatory public education to indoctrinate children from the youngest ages right through high school, after which college would pick up the assignment. Parents, lazy, apathetic, uninvolved and often badly educated and uninformed themselves, allowed this to happen under their metaphorical noses. The horrific result, among many others, is that chaos on college campuses as students whose minds have been poisoned by intersectionality cant now equate the terrorism of Hamas with the civil rights march on Washington.

Good job, everybody!

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Busted! MIT’s Anti-White Program Exposed As the Illegal Discrimination It Is and Was Designed to Be

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Bravo to Prof. William Jacobson’s Equal Protection Project. Its civil rights complaint filed against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exposed the flaming racial discrimination engaged in by the Creative Regal Women of Knowledge, or “The CRWN” program. (Nice acronym-making there, MIT. I’d let the folks at Harvard try the next one while you stick to equations…) Jacobsen’s blog, Legal Insurrection, announced the complaint in a post, MIT Program Open Only To “Women of Color” Challenged By Equal Protection Project As Violating Civil Rights Laws,a week ago. After it received considerable local publicity, MIT tried to weasel its way out of the scandal by changing the way the program is described on its website, as you can see above.

Are they really that dense at MIT? Do its lawyer really think an announcement that says, “This program is designed to exclude white women, but we can’t stop you if you’re white and are determined to take part in a program where you’re obviously not welcome” complies with anti-discrimination laws. Can you imagine a college program described as one “designed to inspire white women” and “to support and celebrate” whites, but adding that its “open” to non-whites too causing anything but an uproar?

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The Late “Supersize Me” Documentarian Was a Big Fraud

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Documentaries can be informative, entertaining and influential, but the more I watch them and the more accessible they become through the streaming platforms, the more it is apparent that they are too often pure propaganda instruments and inherently untrustworthy. Almost no documentaries are made from a neutral or objective points of view. In today’s indoctrination-oriented educational system, they are increasingly weaponized to advance political agendas. Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” despite having many of its “truths” debunked and declared bad science, is still turning up in classrooms as if it weren’t the slick manipulative advocacy production it is. There is the despicable Michael Moore, of course, all of whose documentaries cheat with deceptive editing and politically slanted deceit. Even Ken Burns, whom I once admired, proved with his “The US and the Holocaust” that he could not be trusted. I’m a fool: he is affiliated with PBS. Of course he’s pushing a progressive agenda.

Documentaries should be watched with the presumption that they are dishonest, made from biased perspectives, and untrustworthy. Then it is the burden of the documentary to prove otherwise.

Morgan Spurlock died this week of cancer at the relatively young age of 53. He had one great idea for a gimmick documentary, pulled it off with humor and wit, and made himself famous and rich in the process. The idea became his Oscar-nominated 2004 film “Super Size Me,” documenting his physical deterioration as he ate nothing but McDonald’s fast food for 30 days. The movie followed Spurlock and his girlfriend throughout his Golden Arches orgy, with intermittent interviews with health experts and visits to his alarmed physician as he packed on 25 unhealthy pounds and found his liver function deteriorating. Naturally, many schools across the country couldn’t resist showing the film to gullible students. But the documentary, which earned more than $22 million at the box office, was entirely a scam. (Spurlock certainly left some clues: his production company was called “The Con.”) It was pretty obvious from the beginning, or should have been, that this was hardly a valid scientific experiment, but the same woke, anti-corporate dictators that cheered when Michael Bloomberg taxed jumbo sugary drinks in New York City were thrilled to pretend it was.

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Regarding the Fanaticism, Anti-Semitism, Historical Ignorance and Fascist Inclinations of Today’s Pro-Hamas Campus Protesters: Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Yes, the giant monster chickens have come home to roost. The academics who have used the past decades to indoctrinate malleable students into their victim-obsessed, intersectional ideology while undermining core American values have spawned mutated anti-Semites who regard terrorism as social justice. If this social pathogen didn’t threaten damage far beyond the campuses of woke educational institutions, I would be tempted to respond, “Good! You broke it, you pay for it.” Unfortunately, what’s going on here is far more ominous and potentially destructive.

Just take the time to read the bonkers manifesto of The Drexel Palestine Coalition (DPC), which set up an encampment on the Drexel campus four days ago. You have to read the whole thing to truly appreciate the dishonesty and delusions of this mob, but here are a few highlights to whet your taste for what George Floyd, cynical wokism, the Squad and a feckless President have wrought inflicted on our society;

  • “Label what is happening in Palestine for what it is: a 76 year long genocide and settler-colonial occupation by the State of Israel”
  • “Criticisms of Israel and Zionism will not be mischaracterized as antisemitic or hateful. Furthermore, speech and imagery that express support for Palestine, Palestinians, and Palestinian liberation must be explicitly characterized as acceptable and supported under the University Code of Conduct.”

In other words, “It isn’t what it is.”

  • “Immediately terminate Henry Israeli, professor of Literature of Genocide and the Director of Jewish Studies…”
  • “Immediately terminate Drexel’s chapter of Hillel, a global zionist campus organization, whose primary purpose, funding, and operations are to facilitate birthright trips to Occupied Palestine”
  • “Abolition of DUPD – Drexel Public Safety should not utilize a police force, private or otherwise, given a demonstrated bias against people of color, specifically Black and brown students and (Black Bottom) community members who are primarily low income Black residents.”
  • “Closure of the Starbucks Cafe located in the Lebow Business School”

Close STARBUCKS???? OK, now they’ve really gone too far.

Demands

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Suggested Course For Princeton: “Campus Protesting For Weenies”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I waited a few days before writing about this because I had to stop giggling to type.

I you watch Aaron Sorkin’s excellent if a bit too fawning movie, “The Trial of the Chicago Seven,” you will see that the anti-war campus protesters of the Sixties had, if nothing else, integrity and guts. Maybe they had inherited some from their parents, of “The Greatest Generation.” Today’s student protests in favor of Hamas, terrorism and Jew-killing (I know, I know: “Think of the children!”), in contrast, are marked by hypocrisy, ignorance and weenie-ism.

Princeton has certainly moved to the front of the line in the latter. After the protesting students announced a hunger strike in support of allegedly starving Gazans (Pro tip: if you don’t want to suffer from the predictable consequences of war, don’t elect terrorists as your government). Then they complained that they—the students, now, not the Gazans—were hungry. One female protester shouted into a megaphone, “This is absolutely unfair. My peers and I, we are starving. We are physically exhausted. I am quite literally shaking right now as you can see.” What, is the nearby McDonald’s closed?

Then the protesters persuaded some of the professors whose indoctrination made them the misguided weenies they are to make themselves look foolish by signing a letter of protest in the students’ support. It’s long and infuriating, but here are the best parts…

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Observations on a Scenario in Which Everyone and Everything Involved Looks Bad Including the Schools and American Society in General

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Zoey (above), a high school senior at Ayala High School in Chino Hills, California —we don’t yet know her whole name—was expelled for cyberbullying, intimidation, harassment and attempting to cause physical injury to another person after she used her cell phone to live-stream a classroom brawl between fellow students. There seems to be some suspicion that she was in on the plot to attack one of the combatants, though Zooey denies it. The incident and the report covering it raise all sorts of ethics questions and conclusions.

Such as…

1. Why are students allowed to have cell phones in class at all, specifically cameras? The school has a rule against filming and posting occurrences in the school involving students, potentially embarrassing them, humiliating them and harassing them—why not just confiscate all of the phones before class so this kind of thing is impossible?

2. Zoey’s explanation: “In our generation, you go live to do makeup, to do everything, so it was just going live just to go live. It wasn’t my intent to purposely or try to cause harm to anyone.” I see Zoey has virtually reached adulthood without anyone teaching her that rationalizations aren’t valid reasons for unethical conduct, and “Everybody does it” is particularly wrong.

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Amazing Tales of “The Great Stupid”: the DEI Graduation Announcer

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Res ipsa loquitur. There is no excuse for this. Of course some of the names would give anyone trouble. But Thomas (at Thomas Jefferson University)? Elizabeth?

This was so bad the school issued an apology, though its explanation doesn’t pass the giggle test:

At a certain point, the DEI farce will reach an inevitable tipping point. Too many people are lazy, dumb, timid and gullible, but not enough are THAT lazy, dumb, timid and gullible to put up with clownish displays like the one Thomas Jefferson University inflicted on its nursing school graduates.

I Don’t Understand This “Niggardly Principle” Story At All…Or Maybe I Do and Am Just Afraid To Accept the Truth

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Now get this: In 2017, three 14-year-odlCalifornia teens, two of whom, Holden Hughes and Aaron Hartley, were about to begin attending St. Francis High School, a Catholic private school in Mountain view, were modeling anti-acne medicinal face masks that involved smearing dark green goo on their faces. (One of the boys had severe acne and his friends put the stuff on their own faces in an act of support). The teen who wasn’t headed to the private school snapped a selfie because the boys thought they looked funny. A similar photo taken a day earlier indicated that they had tried white medicinal face masks as well. 

A student at St. Francis found the image online and uploaded it to a group chat in June 2020. Not only was the George Floyd Freakout in full eruption, but the photo was circulated on the same day that recent SFHS graduates had posted on Instagram a satirical meme pertaining to Floyd’s demise, so the school was “triggered.” The gloriously woke student who decided to publicize the greenface photo claimed that the teens were using blackface; “another example” of rampant racism at the school, he posted, and urged everyone in the group chat to spread it throughout the school community—you know, to cause as much anger, division and disruption as possible.

I can’t find the name of that charming kid. He’ll probably be Governor of California some day.

Soon after this seed was planted, the Dean of Students at St. Francis Ray called the Hughes’s and Aaron Hartley’s’ parents to ask them if they were aware of the photograph. They explained that the teens had applied green facemasks three years earlier, long before the non-racial Minnesota incident that had no demonstrable racial significance and definitely no relevance to blackface. The parents added that the teens’ use of the acne medication had “neither ill intent nor racist motivation, nor even knowledge of what “blackface” meant.”

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The Student and the Homeless Man: A Cautionary Ethics Tale

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Or, “Why It’s Unethical to Behave in Defiance of Reality.”

Or, “Why the old saw ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ is constantly being affirmed.”

Or, “Why progressive wishcraft keeps blowing up in society’s metaphorical face”

Sanai Graden (left), a University of California at Berkeley senior (presumably you know what that means) was hit up by a homeless man as she visited Washington, D.C. He said his name was Alonzo, and told her he had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The sympathetic young woman paid for his medication at CVS. She also got him a hotel room for the night. Sanai was a TikToker , and told her followers that she needed to raise money for Alonzo, whom she called “Unc.” Soon she bought Alonzo, aka. “Unc,” a cell phone, and put him up in a hotel for a week.

Awwww. How Christian! How kind! How progressive!

Her video became a Tik Tok sensation, with millions of views. Graden started a GoFundMe account, and it quickly raised more than $400,000. Her legion of followers multiplied: one admirer set up a GoFundMe for her that eventually raised over $26,000.

Isn’t that a nice story?

Then a report from local D.C. TV station Fox 5 revealed that “Unc” was Alonzo Hebron, 64, a long-time criminal who numbered among his convictions one for a violent assault on a homeless woman. In another, he stabbed a man in the neck with a screwdriver. Donors started asking for their money back.

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Ethics Dunce: Ohio State 2024 Commencement Speaker Chris Pan

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Usually the many Ethics Alarms train wreck graphics are reserved for official Ethics Train Wrecks, but not this time. The episode under consideration didn’t involve an actual train, but Ohio State alum Chris Pan‘s commencement address to about 12,000 2024 graduates was somewhat more literally akin to train disasters, at least ones involving trains leaping the tracks.

Outkick has tagged the speech the “Worst Commencement Speech Ever.” I doubt that it is that, but Pan’s self-indulgent blather might be the most unethical one ever—if there have been more unethical addresses, I’m not sure I would want to hear them even as an analytical exercise.

Let’s start with the fact that Pan conceived the speech while he was high on the psychedelic drug Ayahuasca. He admitted this later, and appears to be proud of it, or think its funny, or something. This makes him an Ethics Alarms certified asshole as well as an Ethics Dunce. When people are trusting you to perform at your best in support of an important task, project or event, you don’t impair yourself with foreign substances—not alcohol, not uppers or downers, and definitely not mind altering drugs. Doing so is deliberately defying common sense, personal responsibility, and well-established societal standards.

Moreover, you risk a debacle like the speech you will see in this video. If you like, you can skip the glowing introduction by OSU President Ted Carter, though it provides useful context as Pan was to humiliate Carter as well as himself. It’s a bit like knowing that they called The Titanic “unsinkable” before it sank on its maiden voyage. Pan starts speaking at the 1:47 mark.

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