Education

Fire Brandi Hucko

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments
The Horror.

The Horror.

Let’s stop being mild and measured, shall we? Heads need to role, messages need to be sent, and a culture needs to be saved.

Fire Brandi Hutto.

If she can’t be fired because a union insists that fools and hysterics be allowed to abuse our children and warp our culture, then parents have to boycott the school, while flooding local papers with letters and petitions protesting the lunatic who is running the Garden Gate Elementary School in Cuperino, California. That is, unless this silly, incompetent, stupid, stupid woman gets down on her knees and begs forgiveness from young Braden Bandermann and his family, while also apologizing to his class and the schools itself for making the child feel like a criminal and trying to turn all the other children into trembling, terrified, weenies.

Fire Brandi Hutto. Continue reading →

Bullying To Discourage Bullying : Our Incredibly Incompetent, Unethical Schools

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments
If public schools keep making my head explode, I'm not going to be able to criticize them much longer. Soon, it will be all up to you...

If public school idiocy keeps making my head explode, I’m not going to be able to criticize them much longer. Soon, it will be all up to you…

In Red Hook, New York, a recent anti-bullying workshop at Linden Avenue Middle School for 13 and 14-year-old girls focused on homosexuality and gender identity. Parents learned from their daughters that the girls had been ordered to stand before the group and ask one another for a kiss. Some students were told to stand in front of the class and pretend they were lesbians on a date.

Bullying, as they are supposed to teach you in school, is when someone uses their superior power to subordinate and humiliate someone weaker than themselves. This is wrong, and it is always wrong. It is just as wrong when the bully believes that his or her power is being exercised to make a weaker individual do something that is “good” for them, as in, “Go ahead, jump off that rock, or I’ll beat the snot out of you!” This pathetic, miserably unprofessional, cruel and arrogant political correctness-infected school actually used its authority over these children to force them to do something, in public, that they almost certainly felt was embarrassing and unnatural. This is bullying: the only other equally apt word for it is stupidity. The school’s method of showing students how bullying is wrong is to bully them. In addition, the school neither informed the students’ parents nor received their permission.

Why are we continuing to put up with this? Continue reading →

The Steubenville Ethics Train Wreck: So Far, So Bad

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

steubenville

There has been no mention here of the awful Steubenville, Ohio rape case before today, and there was a reason for that. This is a massive ethics train wreck that is not only still rolling and accumulating passengers and victims, but is also too full of debris and wreckage to fully understand. At the end of this month, a grand jury will begin examining the looming question of whether others besides the two high school football players already convicted of the rape should be indicted.  The town is also doing an investigation of its own. These will help. My hesitation in diving into this gothic American nightmare is that recounting the obvious instances of miserable, heartless, ethically incomprehensible conduct by participants, observers, public officials and commentators doesn’t begin to make sense of it.  We will be analyzing and discussing this episode for a long time—we will have an obligation to do so. It is every bit as important and alarming as the Penn State scandal, and more significant than the infamous New Bedford pool table rape case, which was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film, “The Accused.”

The crucial cultural questions that will have to be answered are these: Continue reading →

“The Only Answer”: An Ethics Hero, A Life Saved, And A Troubling Hypothetical

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments
In this universe, a hero...and in an alternate one? I wonder...

In this universe, a hero…and in an alternate one? I wonder…

University of New Hampshire senior Cameron Lyle, a Division I college track and field competitor who excels in the shot put and hammer throw, has chosen to end his collegiate athletic career to save a stranger’s life.

He will donate his bone marrow today to a 28-year-old man suffering from acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Doctors told Lyle the man who will receive his marrow will live only six months without a transplant, and that there was a only one in five million chance for another non-family match. Yet the odds came up in his favor, thanks to  Lyle having his mouth swabbed to join a bone marrow registry two years ago. He was a perfect match.

Lyle says he never hesitated in his choice, once he was informed. “It’s just a sport,” he said. “Just because it’s Division I college level doesn’t make it any more important. Life is a lot more important than that, so it was pretty easy…It was kind of a no-brainer for a decent human. I couldn’t imagine just waiting. He could have been waiting for years for a match. I’d hope that someone would donate to me if I needed it.”

“He made his decision. He gave up his college season to do this. He’s a gentle giant,” Lyle’s mother said of her 6-foot-2-inch, 255-pound son. “He’ll do anything for anybody.”  Lyle’s coach Jim Boulanger, was also completely supportive, and, according to Lyle, came up with an instant Ethics Quote of the Month when the shot-putter told him of his plans.

“Here’s the deal,” Boulanger told Lyle. “You go to the conference and take 12 throws or you could give a man three or four more years of life. I don’t think there’s a big question here. This is not a moral dilemma. There’s only one answer.” Continue reading →

The Dilemma of the Oblivious Questioner

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments
"Where was I? Oh, right...so what you were saying about client perjury reminds me of a trial in the Boer War...well, it wasn't a trial exactly; that was what Churchill's cousin called it---wait, not Churchill's cousin...the other guy, the one who was such a good canasta player. Nobody plays canasta any more..."

“Where was I? Oh, right…so what you were saying about client perjury reminds me of a trial in the Boer War…well, it wasn’t a trial exactly; that was what Churchill’s cousin called it—wait, not Churchill’s cousin…the other guy…no, it was a girl, I misspoke… the one who was such a good canasta player. Nobody plays canasta any more…”

I launched a new legal ethics seminar today. This is always nerve-wracking, because it has to last exactly three hours, has to cover the topics I’ve included in the printed materials, and the programs are interactive, meaning that the degree of attendee participation is unpredictable. After I’ve done a program a couple of times, I usually have a good idea about which segments prompt a lot discussion and which don’t, so I can time my own comments accordingly. The first time, however, it is pure guesswork.

This one, a country-music themed program, was going to be tight, but was close to schedule until an elderly lawyer burdened with various medical paraphernalia raised his hand. I called on him by reflex, and then realized that he was the same attendee who had blathered on earlier in the program, telling an irrelevant and pointless anecdote that ate up five minutes. Sure enough, the second he got his hands on the mic he was off again, this time making an obscure and convoluted comparison between what I had been discussing and Japanese war crime trials, but it was even worse. He went on tangents; he forgot names; he backtracked; he never made any coherent point. Some people got up and left. It was easily a ten minute filibuster, and permanently killed any chance I had of covering all my material. He finally reached the end, never making clear what the story had to do with anything. I went on to the next segment.

Now I wonder if I handled the situation properly and made the right ethical call, which was to tolerate his clueless intrusion and not embarrass him by cutting him off. Continue reading →

Now THIS Is Incivility!

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

DormRoom1950sThe Delta Gamma sorority chapter at the University of Maryland has received some unwelcome publicity as a result of a leaked e-mail from one of the sorority’s executive board members, reprimanding the Gammas’ for not sufficiently participating in Greek Week activities with their “matchup” fraternity, Sigma Nu. The admonition was delivered in a vulgar, threatening and verbally violent rant containing, among its over 800 words, 4 stupids, 3 variations of ass–, as in “ass-wipe” and “ass-hat,” 5 shits, 2 cocks, 2 sucks, 3 goddamns, and no less than 42 variations of fuck. Gawker, which received the text of the rant, mercifully did not release the young woman’s name when it posted the thing, which is as it should be. No reason to destroy her reputation now. The odds are she’ll do it herself eventually.

I’ll post the whole message at the end, to spare your having to go to Gawker, but here are some brief observations: Continue reading →

Why The Gun Bill Deserved To Lose, and Why We Should All Be Glad It Did

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments
A bad day for Machiavelli is a good day for America.

A bad day for Machiavelli is a good day for America.

Consequentialism rules supreme in Washington, D.C.; that is the tragedy of our political system. If unethical conduct is perceived as having a positive outcome, few in D.C. will continue to condemn the means whereby those beneficial and lauded were achieved. Worse, the results will be seen as validating the tactics, moving them from the category of ethically objectionable into standard practice, and for both political parties

Thus we should all reluctantly cheer the likely demise of the Senate’s gun control bill yesterday. The compromise background check provision that failed wasn’t perfect, but it would have been an improvement over the current system. Nevertheless, the post-Sandy Hook tactics of gun control advocates, including the President and most of the media, have been so misleading, cynical, manipulative and offensive that their tactics needed to be discouraged by the only thing that has real influence in the nation’s Capital: embarrassing failure.

The tainted enterprise begins with the fact that it should not have been a priority at this time at all. Newtown did not signal a crisis; it was one event, and that particular bloody horse had left the barn. The supposedly urgent need to “prevent more Sandy Hooks” was imaginary, but it apparently served the President’s purpose of distracting attention from more genuinely pressing matters, notably the stalled employment situation and the need to find common ground with Republican on deficit and debt reduction. Meanwhile, the conditions in Syria have been deteriorating and North Korea is threatening nuclear war: why, at this time, was the President of the United states acting as if gun control was at the top of his agenda? It was irresponsible, placing political grandstanding above governing. In this context, Obama’s angry words yesterday about the bill’s defeat being caused by “politics” were stunningly hypocritical. The whole effort by his party was about nothing other than politics. Continue reading →

Annoying and Ill-Timed Tangential Issue Dept.: There’s Nothing Especially Virtuous About Running A Marathon

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I sincerely apologize for the timing of this topic, which has actually been percolating in my brain for a while. I first considered it after finding myself annoyed by a commercial running on television of late, comparing various artists who completed major works after their 55th birthdays with a similarly aged woman who recently ran a marathon. Then, yesterday, in the wake of the terrorist attack on my home town, I read multiple Facebook posts from otherwise intelligent people expressing profound sadness for all the marathoners who trained so hard for Boston and were not able to finish. That did it.

I believe we can stipulate, can we not,  that any marathoner who returned home whole after watching fellow competitors having their arms and legs blown off  and complained that the race was terminated before he could finish would immediately be eligible for the Jerk Hall of Fame. If horror, grief and empathy for the victims, concern for the nation, and gratitude for the pure luck of being spared doesn’t wash such selfish thoughts right out of a runner’s mind, then that person needs to keep on running until he has left civilization. Meanwhile, the increasingly accepted cultural attitude that running a marathon or an iron man competition is especially admirable shows something is out of whack in our value system.

I didn’t feel like confronting my Facebook friends yesterday, but please tell me how being prevented from running in a race one has trained for is any more of a tragedy than a thousand other minor disappointments we all face every day, and far less worthy of sympathy than thousands of others. A while back I was blocked from giving a seminar in Tennessee that I had prepared for, because of a storm that grounded all usable flights. That cost my company $5,000. It meant that a lot of Tennessee lawyers had to hustle to find other ways to get their ethics credit, and the ways they found were going to be a lot more boring than I am. Those are real consequences, tangible and significant. What is the result of not being able to finish the Boston Marathon? Who is significantly harmed? Nobody. The marathoner is disappointed and inconvenienced, that’s all. There are other races. He or she is in shape, They did the best they could. The Marathon will be held next year. The terrorist attack is a tragedy. The fact that racers couldn’t cross the finish line is trivial. It just doesn’t matter very much, or shouldn’t.

I’m not condemning runners, any more than I condemn people who spend their spare cash on jewelry, summer houses and vacations instead of saving the whales: it’s their lives and and their priorities, not mine, and they can do what they choose. At the same time, the aura of virtue surrounding extreme runners and the popular myth that running a marathon is more ennobling than commonplace altruistic and practical uses of an individual’s time is bizarre. That commercial I mentioned speaks of being productive in latter years. Running a marathon doesn’t produce anything more than playing a videogame does. Picasso, whose late career artwork is mentioned in the spot, created something beautiful that will be enjoyed for centuries: now that’s productive, and also worthy of admiration and praise. Whose life is enriched by the completion of a marathon, other than the runner’s? It isn’t a communal act, a generous act, a productive, charitable, creative or selfless act. It is a completely self-absorbed and self-focused act, requiring many hours that could just as easily be used communally, generously, productively, charitably, creatively and selflessly. Again, it’s the runner’s life, and if he or she wants to use their brief time on earth to complete manufactured and artificial challenges that accomplish nothing tangible and leave the world no better than it was before, that’s an individual choice; running a marathon doesn’t harm anyone, either, unless it interferes with being a good and attentive father, spouse, and friend. Extolling this kind of activity, however, just distorts societal values, and bestows heroic status on the wrong people, for the wrong things.

Why Does MSNBC Give Melissa Harris-Perry A Platform?

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

This isn’t a free speech issue at all.

Soviet schoolchildren, 1954. They belong.

Soviet schoolchildren, 1954. They belong.

Prof. Perry, an MSNBC talking head, has the same right to make inflammatory, un-American statements that any of us do—and that is the kind of statements she regularly makes—but she is a Marxist. Her ideas and words are cultural poison. A cable network that promotes them is irresponsible.

Now, this is MSNBC, the network that allows Al Sharpton and Ed Schultz to broadcast their hateful rants to the nation, so we knew it was irresponsible, I suppose. These two buffoons, however, are not preaching concepts alien to core American values, and Harris-Perry is. Their presence on the network is unprofessional and obnoxious. Hers is unforgivable.

In a recent MSNBC promo advertising its house communist, Perry, scripted and saying exactly what she intended to convey, is heard saying that Americans..

“…haven’t had a very collective notion that these are our children. We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to their communities…Once it’s everybody’s responsibility and not just the households, then we start making better investments.”

Here’s the video:

She was shocked—shocked!—that these words were controversial and widely condemned. She took to her blog to condemn her critics and, she claimed, “double-down” on her statement. She did not double down, however. She lied and obfuscated, just as any good communist, radical and totalitarian must.  Continue reading →

Different Symptoms, Same Ethics Illness: The Mike Rice-Rutgers Scandal And The Sandusky-Paterno-Penn State Tragedy

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments
Missed out on your statue by thaaaat much, Mike.

Missed out on your statue by thaaaat much, Mike.

The question isn’t, as many news reports would have us believe, whether the Mike Rice affair mandates an administrative house-cleaning at Rutgers. Of course it does. The question is why, after the far uglier Penn State scandal, anyone possessing the gray matter of the Scarecrow from “The Wizard of Oz” thinks otherwise.

In case you are really smart and pay no attention to the dire ethics swamp known as college sports: Mike Rice was a very successful Rutgers basketball coach until ESPN got a hold of a video compilation of him abusing his players on multiple occasions. Though the Rutgers athletic director had seen the damning evidence in November, he let Wise off with a fine and suspension; then the recent national exposure forced him to fire Wise. This prompted Rutger’s president, Robert Barchi, to fire the athletic director (Tim Parnetti) for not taking appropriate action once he had discovered his coach was hitting, assaulting, and taunting players. And Barchi? Even though he knew, or should have known, that Rice’s methods were unacceptable, he never looked at the video (or so he says) that was available to him six months ago, until April. The New York Times reports that many Rutgers officials as well as the university’s outside attorneys knew that Rice was abusing his players,and that he had been doing so for years.

The net lessons learned from the Penn State disaster are zero. As the Times article says, “interviews and documents reveal a culture in which the university was far more concerned with protecting itself from legal action than with protecting its students from an abusive coach.” Yes, a coach attacking student is far short of child-molesting, but that’s  irrelevant: the corrupt cultural syndrome is exactly the same.  Rutgers, top to bottom, placed winning basketball games above sportsmanship, decency, fairness, and protecting their own students. The difference between Rutgers and Penn State is Joe Paterno and moral luck.

Let us be clear: if a teacher physically assaults a student, anywhere, at any level, ever, that teacher has to be fired, and probably prosecuted. A coach is no different. This isn’t open to debate. Yet I listened, as my gorge rose, to the glib and simple-minded conservative radio host Sean Hannity jabber with ex-Notre Dame football coach and facile “inspirational speaker” Lou Holtz about how Parnetti got a raw deal. Why? Parnetti built a great program! So he lets his coaches assault his players—anyone can make a mistake! Isn’t this hindsight? Second-guessing?

“Players are spoiled today; they just aren’t ready to be criticized,” said Holtz, who speaks in platitudes and nostrums that cover a Neanderthal sensibility (so you know he’s much in demand for corporate speaking gigs.)  These men are both ethics-challenged fools, but they have plenty of company.  Rutgers’ report on Rice’s abusive treatment assembled excuses and rationalizations by the authors and others. Rutgers athletic assistants said the video clips showing Rice kicking his players and throwing objects at them “were taken out of context.” What?? In what “context” is it appropriate for a college coach to do this? None! Many of Rice’s players said he prepared them well for tough competition. The report noted that under Rice’s abusive, tortious methods, the players’ grades rose to a B average. Oh! Well, that must mean assault and battery is okay, then, because it works!  This is the ethical standard Rutgers is teaching its students.

Parents everywhere: grab your student and run.

Elsewhere, Rutgers’s internal report called Rice “passionate, energetic and demanding” and concluded that his intense tactics were only aimed at improving his team and “were in no way motivated by animus.” Ah! So beating kids is okay, as long as it’s well-intentioned! This culture is sick, sick, sick and as with Penn State, it is part of a large sick culture that pervades university sports. Here’s one official from another sick school defending Parnetti:

“I think it was unfair for them to fire Pernetti. There were probably a lot of things that went into the decision not to fire Mike Rice in December. And as gruesome as that tape was, it was also a first offense for Mike Rice. I think Pernetti is taking the heat for everything and sometimes in leadership roles you take the glory probably more than you deserve and you take the heat more than you deserve. I think right now Pernetti is taking the heat more than he deserves.”

A first offense???? The video was compiled from dozens of incidents, and Rice’s penchant for violence and abuse were already known! Yeah, there were  “a lot of things that went into the decision not to fire”  Rice, none of which add up to a single good reason not to get rid of any coach who beats up kids in his charge.

The New York Post interviewed a college official who believes its all Facebook and Twitter’s fault:

“The whole situation, top to bottom is a shame. But my opinion is that there is no manual or rule book for how to handle these types of situations. To say (Pernetti) should have handled this situation a certain way, well unless you’ve been in his shoes, it’s hard to comment on it. Obviously there was a reason why Pernetti kept Mike Rice around. What was that reason? We don’t know. But one thing I saw was that his kids, his players backed him. So In my opinion do you know what got Mike Rice and Tim Pernetti fired? Social media got them fired. People make comments and form opinions without knowing all the facts sometimes. That’s the world we live in now.”

Yes, there is a rule book, and it’s called ethics, not that this guy, or whatever college he works for, would recognize it. “Unless you’ve been in his shoes”? The translation of this fatuous and offensive rationalization is simple: “Hey, there’s a lot of pressure on this guy to win, and he’s not going to let a couple of bruised sophomores jeopardize the won-lost record and alumni support. I bet you’d let the kids get beat up too.”

I wonder what schools those two anonymous officials work for? That’s the frightening part;  they could be working at almost any big time sports school, because that’s the predominant culture there.

__________________________

Sources: New York Times, Sean Hannity, New York Post