Education

It Depends On What the Meaning of ‘Conservative’ Is…Ethics, Language, Law, Art and Priorities Clash in a Strange University Case

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

That’s “Rust Red Hills” (1930), by Georgia O’Keeffe above. Does it seem “conservative” to you? Does “conservative” even seem like a word that can be relevant to such a painting?

Welcome to the weird court petition filed by Valparaiso University in Indiana. The school wants to be able to get around the terms of a large testamentary gift that it happily accepted in 1953. Percy Sloan donated millions of dollars and hundreds of fine art works in honor of his father, Junius R. Sloan, a famous artist in the Hudson River School. His will directed that any art acquired with the funds must be “exclusively by American artists preferably of American subjects” and “of the general character known as conservative and of any period of American art.” The University wants to sell some of the most valuable paintings it purchased with Sloan’s bequest, including the one above, to fund the construction of new dormitories.

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AOC Is Here To Tell Us That…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Well, something. Yes, hold on to your butts: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is imparting what she regards as wisdom. I was going to make this an Unethical Quote of the Week, then I decided that I didn’t know what it was, except disturbing. Here is what she ranted last night in a live stream; I’ll have some rueful comments at the end…

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“Ignorance Saturday” Continues: If This Survey Is Accurate (And I’m Sure It Is) What Good Is College?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni have released a survey titled LOSING AMERICA’S MEMORY 2.0,A Civic Literacy Assessment of College Students. It’s a follow-up to its earlier report, Losing America’s Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century. None of the depressing results in either study surprised me, and, I presume, will surprise you, but they do raise obvious questions as well as compel some conclusions.

Among the findings in the most recent survey of more than 3,000 college and university students regarding their basic civic literacy:

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‘Why Columbia, It Profits a University Nothing To Give Its Soul For The Whole World… But For An Ethics Villain Like Dean Josef Sorrett?’

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I don’t understand the latest chapter in Columbia’s anti-Semitism scandal at all. I don’t understand how anyone connected to the university can look at themselves in the mirror after this. I don’t understand how alumni and donors can tolerate it. Most astounding of all, in its shameless embrace of The King’s Pass, Columbia University has managed to make Harvard look like an ethics exemplar by comparison.

No, I don’t understand.

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Oh, Just Shut Up, Professor Lichtman…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

OK, I should get this out of the way up front: I’m unalterably biased against any 77 year old man who wears his hair like that, if indeed that is the professor’s real hair, which I doubt.

Then there is the fact that a vast majority of historians are Trump Deranged or have otherwise migrated into the progressive propaganda camp. Presidential historians are particularly shameful in this regard, and one of the worst is American University Professor Allan Lichtman. He was all over the TV this weekend, chasing another 15 minutes of fame as a commentator on the Democratic Party’s Joe Biden problem from an alleged historical perspective. The Big Whoop about Lichtman is that he has developed a formula that predicted the results of nine of the 10 most recent presidential elections, so that is supposed to make him an expert. It doesn’t. To begin with, his system doesn’t have “the incumbent can’t think or talk clearly any more” feature.

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Jill Biden: An Ethics Villain’s Route to Power

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

This explains a lot…

Since there is some reason to suspect that Jill Biden has been doing an Edith Wilson impression for at least some of her husband’s ill-starred term as President, a substacker decided to do a deep dive into Dr. Jill Biden’s dissertation to assess exactly how intellectually qualified she is to be shadow-President. What she found was, to understate it, horrifying….and yet, all in all, not surprising.

To summarize, the doctorate of education Jill received from the University of Delaware in January 2007 was based on a “scholarly” dissertation that was objectively crap. It is riddled with typos, mathematical errors, and horrible writing. Holly Mathnerd (not her real name, presumably) writes in part (this is a huge essay),

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Ethics Quiz: Harvard’s Honorary Degrees

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Hmmmm.

Here are the distinguished individuals Harvard saw fit to award honorary degrees to at graduation this year. (I’m sure some of them, heck, maybe all, are very fine people) :

  • Gustavo Dudamel, music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, his home country, and music and artistic director-designate of the New York Philharmonic
  • Jennie Chin Hansen, immediate past chief executive of the American Geriatrics Society, and past president of AARP—a pioneer in care for the elderly.
  • Sylvester James Gates Jr., Clark Leadership Chair in Science and Distinguished University Professor and a University System of Maryland Regents Professor, a theoretical physicist who has worked on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory.
  • Joy Harjo, twenty-third Poet Laureate of the United States, 2019-2022, the author of 10 books of poetry (plus plays, children’s books, and two volumes of memoir), and a performing musician who played for many years with her band, Poetic Justice, and has produced seven albums.
  • Maria A. Ressa, co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 (with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov) for her brave, independent news coverage of her native Philippines.

(Former Harvard president Lawrence Bacow also got an honorary degree, but ex-Harvard presidents always do if they manage not to get fired for plagiarism, so he doesn’t count.)

Interesting. Out of five honorees, not one was a white American, not even a white woman, or a white LGTBQ warrior. A Venezuelan male, a female Filipino, Harjo is Native American, Gates is black, and Hansen is Asian American.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Week is…

Is there anything wrong with this roster?

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And Now For Something Completely Different: An Ethics Challenge on Slavery Reparations

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Except for one brief moment of frustration and madness, Ethics Alarms has been consistent in its derision of the concept of reparations for slavery. Illogical, legally unhinged, divisive, anti-democratic and most of all, impossible, this really bad idea, a favorite of get-rich-quick racial grievance hucksters and reality-resistant progressives, still hangs around like old unwashed socks, and no amount of argument or reasoning seems to be able to send them to the rag pile. Recently both California, where terrible leftist ideas go to thrive and ruin things, and New York, which really should be moved to the West Coast, have both at least pretended to endorse reparations for slavery. California’s ridiculous reparations task force has proposed giving $223,200 each to all descendants of slaves in California, on the theory that it will be a just remedy for housing discrimination against blacks between 1933 and 1977. The cost to California taxpayers would be about $559 billion, more than California’s entire annual budget (that the state already can’t afford), and that doesn’t include the massive cost of administrating the hand-outs and dealing with all the law suits it is bound to generate.

Brilliant. But that’s reparations for you! Logic, common sense and reality have nothing to do with it.

Now comes two wokey professors from—you guessed it, Harvard, to issue a scholarly paper published in “The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences,” titled “Normalizing Reparations: U.S. Precedent, Norms, and Models for Compensating Harms and Implications for Reparations to Black Americans.” The thesis of this thing is essentially that reparations for slavery should be paid because “Everybody Does It,” offering variations of the #1 rationalization on the list that don’t properly apply to slavery at all. (What? The descendants of slaves are not like fishermen facing depleted fish stocks?) The paper is being called a “study”: it is not a study, but rather an activist advocacy piece. (I would have bet that both scholars are black; nope, just one is, although I would not be surprised to learn that Linda J. Bilmes signed on just to help Cornell William Brooks avoid the obvious accusation of bias and conflict of interest. And, naturally, at Harvard taking on such a mission, certifiably bats though it is, can only enhance her popularity on campus.)

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“OOOOOOKE—lahoma Where The Fools Want Bibles In the Schools…”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Morons.

Just as the Far Left plays into the worst conservative stereotypes about them with demands like abortion right up to birth and open borders, the Far Right parodies itself with Constitution-defying laws like Louisiana’s requiring the Ten Commendments to be displayed in public school classrooms. Now Oklahoma says, “Hold my beer!”with the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters announcing in a memo today that every Oklahoma school must teach students the Bible the 2024-2025 school year. “The Bible is an indispensable historical and cultural touchstone,” Walters said in a press release unveiling the mandate. “Without basic knowledge of it, Oklahoma students are unable to properly contextualize the foundation of our nation which is why Oklahoma educational standards provide for its instruction. This is not merely an educational directive but a crucial step in ensuring our students grasp the core values and historical context of our country.”

There is no chance, none, zip, nada, that this obviously religiously motivated law will stand up to judicial scrutiny. This is pure grandstanding.

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Quick Note: Commenter Banning Alert [Expanded and Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

“Not a Lawyer” has been banned. Don’t reply to any of his comments if he tries to sneak one in.

After arguing relentlessly, snottily and obnoxiously about what is a justified impeachment, this guy revealed in his last post—and by that I do mean last— that he doesn’t even know what an impeachment is, writing that “no Presidents have been impeached.”

Hell, I knew about that common misconception by the historically and constitutionally ignorant when I started giving my U.S. Presidents presentation in Miss Barrett’s fifth grade class at the age of 9. Since the House has impeached Presidents three times since 1996, there is no excuse for a responsible, educated citizen not to know that an impeachment is like an indictment, and no President has been found guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” though Johnson survived by one vote in the Senate, and Nixon would have certainly been convicted. There is even less excuse for someone so uniformed to come here and argue with me about what’s an ethical impeachment. Yeah, I’m ticked off.

Believe it or not, my time is valuable. If you’re going to argue, do your homework, which at a bare minimum means knowing the basics of what you’re arguing about.

***

UPDATE: Not a Lawyer has been reinstated, as you can see in the comments below.

I am taking his explanation as sincere, and since he is Not a Lawyer, I have some confidence that he’s not just skillfully writing what he thinks will be be persuasive. I’ve reversed bans before, but not often, because the vast majority of those exiled react like the recently banned commenter who replied, “Fuck you, you Trump supporting fascist!”” Welcome home, Not a Lawyer. Your slate is clean.