Education

Harvard Grade Inflation Ethics and the DEI Train Wreck, Part I: A Depressing Protest From Students “Of Color”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

[This is a long post, but I urge you to read it all the way through. I cannot imagine a more powerful rebuttal to the advocates of “diversity, equity and inclusion.”]

Last October, in “Harvard’s Self-Indicting Grade Inflation Report,” I wrote about the school’s embarrassing report that revealed that 60% of the grades handed out at the supposedly elite college (my alma matter, and my sister’s, and my father’s, where my mother was Dean of Housing once-upon-a-time) are now As, making Harvard resemble Garrisons Keilor’s imaginary Minnesota community where “all the children” seem to be are “above average” even though that’s impossible.

In a prescient comment (as is often the case), AM Golden wrote in part, taking off from a Dean Amanda Claybaugh’s statement that it was desirable to “ produce a broader distribution of grades,”

That’s the problem. They don’t want to admit they accept unqualified applicants because many of those applicants will be disproportionately minorities. Returning standards to what an elite institution should have will mess with the faculty push for D.E.I. The standards have to stay low if the experiment is to be prioritized over pure academics. They have set too many precedents to easily back away now…

They have created bubbles where remote learning, mask wearing, protesting for the correct causes and making equal outcomes are virtues valued over a solid education. Backing up now will cause mass revolt on campuses. Like the news media, the colleges will be accused of caving to Trump. The asylum has been run by people who should have been inmates for so long that the actual inmates can’t be helped.

Sometimes I think Ethics Alarms is the only online community where clear-eyed vision dependably resides. For right on cue, as Harvard announced a long term effort to start grading seriously again, a coalition of “of color” Harvard students sent this open letter to the campus:

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Ethics Hero: Laura Hughes

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The widow of high school teacher Jason Hughes, 40, who died during a student prank gone horribly wrong in Gainesville, Georgia, is demonstrating how some human beings can overcome anger, bitterness and the emotional need for retribution, choosing compassion and empathy instead.

Around 11 p.m. on March 6, Jordan Wallace, Elijah Tate Owens, Aiden Hucks, Ana Katherine Luque and Ariana Cruz, all 18-years-old, toilet-papered trees outside the Hughes’ home, a continuation of their school’s tradition of such pranks during exam week. As the group piled into two vehicles to flee, Jason Hughes ran out of his home to confront the teens, but tripped and fell into the road. Wallace, who had already begun speeding away in a pickup truck, accidentally ran over the prone teacher. The teens left their vehicles to render aid, but Hughes perished in the incident.

All five teens were charged with criminal trespassing and littering on private property; Wallace has has been charged with first degree murder as well as reckless driving.

Laura Hughes, who is also a teacher, is pleading with authorities to drop the criminal charges. “We ask that you continue to pray for our family and also for the students involved in the accident along with their families,” she said in a statement to reporters. “Please join us in extending grace and mercy to them as Christ has done for us…This is a terrible tragedy, and our family is determined to prevent a separate tragedy from occurring, ruining the lives of these students.”

The late father of two (above, next to his wife) wasn’t trying to angrily confront the pranksters but “was excited and waiting to catch them in the act,” Laura told the New York Times. Insisting that her husband was not pursuing the students to reprimand them but rather to express comradery with their innocently-intended prank. Hughes said that criminal punishment “would be counter to Jason’s lifelong dedication of investing in the lives of these children.”

First degree murder sounds like extreme over-charging by authorities. The entire episode is a blazing example of the caprices of moral luck. I agree that the students’ punishment should be left to the school if Laura Hughes doesn’t want to press charges. Ethics tells us that it is time to mitigate the damage, not to make the damage worse.

A Quick Ethics Villains Inventory…[Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

A lot of unethical junk has been flying around lately, and just to keep my brain clear (and yours) I feel the need to take stock. This isn’t a complete list, of course, just one that includes miscreants whose conduct and/or character I feel need additional attention here…

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Apparently A Majority Of Younger Americans Think The U.S. Invented Slavery. I’ll See You At The Wood-Chipper…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

A few days ago, I saw a chart showing what U.S. demographics believed that the United States invented slavery. I noted it for a future post, and now I can’t find it, but I found plenty of authority that supports that assertion. Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal, has been making this point for years. Way back in 2016, The College Fix wrote in part,

For 11 years, Professor Duke Pesta gave quizzes to his students at the beginning of the school year to test their knowledge on basic facts about American history and Western culture.

The most surprising result from his 11-year experiment? Students’ overwhelming belief that slavery began in the United States and was almost exclusively an American phenomenon, he said.

“Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America,” Pesta told The College Fix. “They are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War, and they are very fuzzy about the history of slavery prior to the Colonial era. Their entire education about slavery was confined to America.”…

The origin of these quizzes, which Pesta calls “cultural literacy markers,” was his increasing discomfort with gaps in his students’ foundational knowledge.

“They came to college without the basic rudiments of American history or Western culture and their reading level was pretty low,” Pesta told The Fix….

Often, more students connected Thomas Jefferson to slavery than could identify him as president, according to Pesta. On one quiz, 29 out of 32 students responding knew that Jefferson owned slaves, but only three out of the 32 correctly identified him as president. Interestingly, more students— six of 32—actually believed Ben Franklin had been president.

Pesta said he believes these students were given an overwhelmingly negative view of American history in high school, perpetuated by scholars such as Howard Zinn in “A People’s History of the United States,” a frequently assigned textbook.

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Public Education Report From Wisconsin, or “Yikes!”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Guest post by Cornelius Gotchberg

[From your host: This is one horror tale from a state’s education system. Wisconsin is surely not alone.]

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (W.I.L.L.) reported,   “In 2024 DPI (State of Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction) lowered the standards and cut scores for proficiency on Wisconsin DPI’s Forward Exam for the most recent academic year.“ W.I.L.L. also discovered that DPI “lowered school report card points in 2020-21 and changed the labels on the reports in 2023-24.

  Hurley (WI) School District officials, among others, complained that this fist on the scale made their students’ above average achievements suddenly seemmediocre. The Iron County Miner supplied the following December 16, 2024 quote from Hurley School District Administrator Kevin Genisot, who declared (bolding mine),

“It’s important to note this: The state this year, before finalizing their final numbers of the state report card, came up with a set of numbers, They ran them and they said, “Oh, these numbers are allowing too many districts to score well. That won’t look good. Let’s adjust these numbers.’ And that’s right from DPI. telling you what they’re doing as they do the report cards.”

In short, DPI “followed the science,” and didn’t like where it took them, so they pursued policy-based evidence-making rather than evidence-based policy-making.

As Paul Harvey would say, “And now, the rest of the story.” Six months prior, in June of 2024, 88 “expert educators” gathered at the Chula Vista Resort for a four-day, taxpayer-funded shindig. Its alleged purpose: To redefine what constitutes proficiency in math and reading.

After DPI had sandbagged a January 21, 2025 “Daily Sentinel” FOIA request for a full year, the Institute For Reforming Government (IRG) sent a January 22, 2026 follow up. What did they find? Not much! No recordings of the proceedings were made nor were any meeting minutes provided. And participants had to sign non-disclosure agreements! That’s uncommon secrecy for a taxpayer-funded event with mandatory transparency.

The Daily Sentinel wrote: “The agency did not provide receipts for staff time, food, travel, or lodging […] Taxpayers are left to wonder how much of that $368,885 was spent on resort amenities, alcohol, or water park access for the 88 educators and various staff in attendance.”

Even making generous expenditure allowances for three nights single occupancy lodging @$250/night, four day per diem @$150/day, and $50,000 for meeting rooms and incidentals, that would still leave over $200,000 unaccounted for.

The WI Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee has appropriately delayed $2 million in funding as they await an explanation of this spectacularly extravagant profligacy.The state’s over-burdened taxpayers deserve answers.
  

I’m Feeling Hopeless Regarding Whether The Unethical Use of Higher Education As Leftist Indoctrination Can Be Eradicated In Time…[Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This story is the latest reason for my despair.

The unethical and diabolical woman on the left, physically and politically,

… is UC Berkeley professor of ethnic studies, gender and women’s studies and performance studies Juana María Rodríguez. Not content to rot the brains and values of her students, she has weaponized her charges to inject Leftist propaganda into the general population through Wikipedia, itself a propagator of biased and left-slanted disinformation.

Beginning in 2016, Rodríguez has assigned her students to create and edit Wikipedia articles about LGBTQ+ people. Her special focus is on gay and transgender “people of color,” of course, because that’s how people like her roll. The manipulating of the online encyclopedia gets credit in three of her classes: “Documenting Marginal Lives,” “Queer of Color Cultural Production” and “Queer of Color Critique.”

I would not hire any job applicant who had taken any of those courses, nor would I send my child to any school that treated those subjects as worthy of academic study.

“I want my students to think of themselves as not just consumers of knowledge but as being able to produce knowledge as well,” Rodríguez explained in a smoking gun email. This is new: a college professor who doesn’t know what “knowledge” means. One doesn’t produce knowledge, (“facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject”) one seeks, acquires, conveys, and distributes knowledge. Producing knowledge is called “making stuff up.”

The professor allows students to skip finals in exchange for doing her propaganda work.

Rodríguez integrates Wikipedia into her curricula in collaboration with Wiki Education, a nonprofit organization that encourages faculty in the United States and Canada to assign their students to create content for Wikipedia articles, aiming to fill in “knowledge gaps” on Wikipedia regarding gender, racial and ethnic diversity. Rodríguez’s students alone have added more than 300,000 edits and 3,000 citations to Wikipedia. the professor says she’s “really proud” that her students’ propaganda has been viewed an estimated 96 million times. Isn’t that wonderful?

How many societal termites like this are being paid by institutions of higher learning to distort reality, then education, and finally the culture? I’m beginning to fear that Americans were asleep at the metaphorical switch so long that the progressive body- and mind-snatchers spread their sinister pods so deeply in our comunities’ collective consciousness that the battle was already lost before it was even discovered.

Happy Birthday, George Washington From Ethics Alarms, And Thank Your Dad For Us Too…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It’s George Washington’s birthday. Nine years ago I wrote, in one of my annual posts on perhaps our most important President (George Will calls him “the Indispensable Man) that something has gone seriously wrong when one’s blog has 287 posts on Donald Trump and only six about Washington. I don’t even want to think about what the count is now, but here is another one in George’s column.

George Washington’s father Augustine had at one time or another run across a list of 110 virtues that young men should adopt and practice in order to be become civil, respectful and honorable members of polite society. He made George, and presumably all his sons (he had six of them) copy them by hand to aid in memorizing the list. George, at least, dutifully committed to memory “110 Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,”  which was  based on a document composed by French Jesuits in 1595; neither the author nor the English translator and adapter are known today. The elder Washington was following the theory of Aristotle, who held that principles and values began as being externally imposed by authority (morals) and eventually became internalized as character.

Those ethics alarms installed by his father stayed in working order throughout George’s remarkable life. It was said that Washington was known to quote the rules when appropriate, and never forgot them. They did not teach him to be the gifted leader he became, but they helped to make him a trustworthy one.

The list has been available on Ethics Alarms under Rule Book since its beginnings in 2009. By all means read the whole list; I have used it often in ethics seminars but haven’t referred to it here for too long. The 90 rules omitted in the list below contain some gems too, and many that raise curiosity about what exactly the author was thinking of. For example, I find #2. “When in company, put not your hands to any part of the body not usually discovered” and #3. “Show nothing to your friend that may affright him” intriguing.

Below are my 20 favorite entries from the list that helped make George George, therefore helped George make America America:

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On Lincoln’s Favorite Poem, and the Poems’ We Memorize…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This topic is almost tangential to ethics, but not entirely. I give Althouse credit for raising it: she sometimes comments on crossword puzzles—I hate crossword puzzles and have never finished one in my life—and was set off into one of her tangents by the clue, “8 letters: “Poem so beloved by Abraham Lincoln that he carried it in his pocket and memorized it.” As it happens, I know the answer (Ann did not): it’s Poe’s “The Raven.” No surprise there: Abe was a depressive, and that dark poem about lingering suicidal thoughts fits his character and also his taste in poetry. I think “The Raven” is doggerel, and so were Lincoln’s poems: yes, he wrote poems, and was always puzzling to me that such a poetic writer would write such pedestrian poetry. He’s nt the only one who fits that description: Herman Melville’s poems, save for the one that ends “Billy Budd, ” is also shockingly bad. But I digress…

Ann guessed that the poem was “Invictus,” which would make sense if Abe favored a poem that inspired him, as, I believe, many of us do. That one ends with the famous verse,

“It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.”

Teddy Roosevelt loved that one, as you might guess. The topic got me thinking about how our schools used to teach ethics as well as literature, not to mention mental acuity, by requiring us to memorize poems. I’m sure they don’t do this now, and I’m also confident that the declining ethical instincts as well as literary competence of today’s youth are in part rooted in this sad development.

Poetry is becoming a dead genre. Althouse excluded songs from her musings about what favorite poems say about our values and character, and I find that strange. Song lyrics are poems, at least the best of them. No unscored poem touches me as much as Irving Kahal’s lyrics to Sammy Fain’s haunting melody, one of my late wife’s favorites….

I’ll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces
All day through

In that small cafe
The park across the way
The children’s carousel
The chestnut tree, the wishing well 
I’ll be seeing you
In every lovely summer’s day
In everything that’s light and gay
I’ll always think of you that way

I’ll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
But I’ll be seeing you…

Similarly, the touching Longfellow poem about his depression during the Civil War over the death of his wife, the wounding of his son and the conflict dividing his country was set to music, making it classic Christmas song that has endured in the culture beyond most of his poems. Putting a poem to music shouldn’t disqualify the poem as a poem, though the melody can enhance its power and popularly.

My favorite poems were narrative poems the celebrated heroism, courage, sacrifice, devotion and nobility. I have written several times about my father’s favorite poem, Rudyard Kipling’s “If” : the lines “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster…And treat those two impostors just the same”; has become my credo over the years, and served me well. This past Halloween I posted my favorite poem, “The Highwayman,” which I memorized when I was 10 and have recited to audiences many times since. It is about a young woman who gives her life to warn her lover. I also memorized Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” an inspiring poem about an American patriot.

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Ethics Dunce (Again): Georgetown University Law Center…and May I Add: KABOOM!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

From Ethics Alarms, December 10, 2023…

Late yesterday,the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, resigned, and the school’s chairman of the board followed with his own resignation a couple of hours later. Magill was one of three elite college presidents who embarrassed themselves and their employers with offensive, legalistic answers to pointed questions from Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) regarding their school’s tolerance of anti-Semitism on their campus in the wake of the October Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, and their weak responses to demonstrations on their campuses that could fairly be called threatening to Jewish students.

UPenn’s situation became critical when alumnus Ross Stevens announced that he was withdrawing a gift worth around $100 million. That would be a significant loss even for Harvard, whose endowment exceeds the treasuries of many nations. The resignation immediately focused attention on Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president of just a couple of months, whose responses to Stefanik’s withering cross-examination in the Congressional hearing were extremely similar to Magill’s. The resignation of all three women was called for in an unusual letter signed by 72 members of Congress, many of them Democrats.

I just received this message as a Georgetown University Law Center alumnus:

Dear Georgetown Law Alumni,

It gives me great pleasure to share with you that M. Elizabeth (Liz) Magill has been appointed as the next Executive Vice President and Dean of Georgetown University Law Center, beginning August 1, 2026. President Robert M. Groves’ announcement is linked here.

Professor Magill brings to Georgetown Law a wealth of experience leading some of our nation’s most prestigious universities and law schools, including serving as President of the University of Pennsylvania, Executive Vice President and Provost of the University of Virginia, and Dean of Stanford Law School. I am pleased to share that, in addition to her role as Executive Vice President and Dean, Professor Magill will join the Law Center as a tenured member of the faculty. And her Georgetown roots run deep—her father and three of her siblings are Georgetown graduates.

Professor Magill is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Virginia School of Law, where she was articles development editor of the Virginia Law Review. Following law school, she clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and then for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She is an award-winning scholar of administrative and constitutional law whose research focuses on topics such as the separation of powers, standing, regulation, and judicial review. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the American Law Institute.

This is a critical time for the Law Center and the University. I am confident that Professor Magill is the right person to lead the Law Center into a new era marked by academic excellence, financial resilience, and national prominence. There will be many opportunities over the next several months for you to meet Professor Magill. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming her to Georgetown University and to the Law Center. 

Sincerely,

Joshua C. Teitelbaum
Interim Dean & Executive Vice President
David Belding Professor of Law

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Ethics Quiz: The I.C.E. Endorsement

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Sarai Jimenez, a special education teaching intern at in Pajaro Valley School District’s Watsonville, California-based MacQuiddy Elementary, endorsed the presence of I.C.E. officers in her town in a comment on Facebook last month.

“Yay!!! We need ICE in Watsonville!! It’s been getting out of hand,” Jimenez wrote, as you can see above. But the parents in Pajaro Valley Unified School District, where 84% of students are Hispanic and, given California’s sanctuary state aspirations, might belong to families with one or more illegal immigrants, considered Jimenez’s support for ICE….that is, enforcement of U.S. law…unconscionable. Many complained, and Jimenez was placed on leave from her job in Pajaro Valley School District. It appears that she will be fired, if she hasn’t been already.

“You can’t just tell the world how you feel and not expect repercussions from people because of how they feel about I.C.E.,” local parent Jorge Guerrero said. If I were awake completely, which I’m not, I would compose several alternate versions of this statement with provocative substitutes for “I.C.E.”

Jimenez tried to save her job by groveling a politician-style denial rather than an apology,“I’m sorry that the comment was taken out of context,” she told reporters. “But my actions speak so much louder than all those hateful bullies’ words.” The hateful bullies are the ones who bombarded her with threats and insults until she took down her Facebook page. “You are a shameful disgraceful disgusting woman,” one critic wrote.

Predictably, though apparently not by the interning teacher, the school administrators sided with the bullies if not their methods (although firing someone for supporting law enforcement is a lot more harmful than insulting her).

MacQuiddy Elementary Principal Sara Pearman said in a statement that Jimenez’s comment “does not reflect the values” of the school or district.

Hmmmm…

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is it ethical to fire Jimenez for expressing support for law enforcement officials doing their jobs?

I think this is a close call. Some points:

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