In Del Rio, California, 13-year-old Cody Alicea rides with an American flag on the back of his bike. He does this, he says, to be patriotic and to honor veterans, like his grandfather. He’s been flying the flag on his bike for two months, but at the beginning of the week of Veteran’s Day was told by a school official at Denair Middle School that some students had been complaining about the flag and it was no longer allowed on school property. Continue reading
Education
Texas Cheerleading Ethics: Cheer Your Rapist!
In the current issue of Sports Illustrated, Selena Roberts relates the tale of an ethical outrage, one that will makes your heart sink at the realization that there is so much incompetence, lack of common sense, cruelty and irresponsibility in the world…and that so much of it resides in high school administration.
A Silsbee (Texas) High School cheerleader, identified in the story only as “H.S.”, had told police that she had been cornered in a room by three school athletes during a party, and sexually assaulted. Her screams were heard by others at the party, and charges were filed. Roberts writes, “In a town whose population is 7,341 and whose high school football stadium seats 7,000…the alleged assault prompted two questions: How would it affect the girl? And how would it affect the team?” Continue reading
Students Learn Why Competence Is An Ethical Duty, The Hard Way: The Case of the Illiterate Principal
Last month, Principal Andrew Buck of the Middle School for Art and Philosophy in Brooklyn responded to complaints about the school’s chronic shortage of textbooks by telling eachers and students that textbooks were over-rated. In an e-mail to teachers containing ungrammatical sentences, incorrect punctuation, misspellings and incoherent statements, Buck told his employees that textbooks weren’t essential to the learning process, and noted that some students wouldn’t be able to read the books anyway.
A representative sample from the letter, which you can read in more detail here (it requires registering for Google Docs): Continue reading
Ethics Train Wreck at Howell High: the Teacher, the Belt Buckle, and the Purple Shirt
This incident, from Howell High in Livingston Michigan, is an ethics train wreck, and a tough one to analyze.
A Michigan teacher has been accused of bullying students in an incident sparked by the teacher himself wearing a purple shirt in a gesture of support toward gay students who suffer at the hands of bullies.
Jay McDowell, a teacher at the high school, wore a purple shirt to class on a day approved by the school for students to wear purple in support of gay teens. This came in response to several nationally publicized incidents of bullying and beating of gays, leading, in some cases, to suicide. When one student asked about the teacher’s shirt, McDowell’s explanation sparked an argument. 16-year-old Daniel Glowacki protested that McDowell had just asked another student to remove a belt buckle bearing the image of the Confederate flag, which McDowell sais was offensive to him. Glowacki, however, argued that it was inconsistent and unfair for the teacher to make a student remove a symbol he felt was offensive, but force students, like Glowacki, to tolerate the purple shirts and rainbow flags, which Glowacki said celebrated conduct that he, as a Catholic, found offensive to his personal beliefs. He then announced that he didn’t accept gays, and another student agreed. The teacher ejected and suspended both of them for inappropriate and disruptive class conduct.
The school, in response to parent objections, then disciplined McDowell. The letter of reprimand read: Continue reading
Why Future Juan Williamses Will Be Fired, As George Mason Rolls Over In His Grave
College speech codes are the American Left’s special shame, and it the time for them to go the way of parietal hours and mandatory chapel attendance is overdue. There are monstrosities of thought control in schools across the nation, but those in state universities are especially offensive and ominous, since they are in slam-dunk defiance of the First Amendment prohibiting government restrictions on speech. As Barton Hinkle notes in an eye-opening piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, not only are state schools stomping on free speech, state schools dedicated to the legacy on the men who wrote the First Amendment are doing it. If there is anything more unethical than educators stifling thought and the expression of it, that would be it. Continue reading
Ethics Double Dunces in Ohio: McDonald’s Owner Paul Siegfried and Rep. Jean Schmidt (R, OH.)
The great state of Ohio gave us two Ethics Dunces last week, both related to the upcoming election, both Republicans, both outrageous. Your call as to who was worse; it’s awfully close:
1. Paul Siegfried, Ohio Ethics Dunce #1: The owner of several McDonald’s in northeastern Ohio distributed Republican campaign material to his employees and added a threatening note to their paycheck envelope “suggesting” that three G.O.P. candidates receive their support. Continue reading
Eliot Spitzer, the Harvard Club, and Blackball Ethics
Eliot Spitzer, we have learned, has been blackballed by the New York City Harvard Club. Although over 11,000 graduates of the august institution are members, and the club, which is always seeking funds and rejects an application about as frequently as its alma mater plays a decent football game, nonetheless found Spitzer wanting.
Is this a surprise to anyone? There are only a few reasons to join the Harvard Club or even tolerate it, unless one has an unhealthy affection for the stuffed heads of things Theodore Roosevelt shot, many of which are hanging on the wall. The main reason is prestige (and to let visitors know that you graduated from Harvard without having to say so). A club, by its very nature, suggests some degree of exclusivity; one’s cache from belonging to a club derives from its members. I can imagine a rational person feeling some sense of pride in belonging to a club of Harvard graduates. I cannot imagine a rational person feeling any special sense of exclusivity emanating from membership in a club that includes Eliot Spitzer. Continue reading
When Not Voting Is The Right Thing To Do
I just listened to a CNN host chastise Americans for their relatively low voting percentage (less than 50%), and then urge “everybody” to vote–“Men and women have died for your right to vote!” he said. “Democrat, Republican, Independent or undecided–go to the polls and vote!”
Inspiring. And wrong. Continue reading
Accountability Follies: The B.C. Law Student’s Unethical Lament
An anonymous Boston College Law School student, soon to graduate, has requested a refund of his tuition because he is unemployed and sees no legal job in his immediate future. On a B.C. student website, he has posted an “open letter” to the school’s Dean: Continue reading
Incompetence Follies: Fractured History For Virginia’s Fourth Graders
Bob and Ray, the great deadpan comedy team that mastered the form of the comedy interview on radio, recordings and TV, once has a routine about a longshoreman without a high school diploma who had written a voluminous “History of the United States.”
“But the book is riddled with errors!” protested Bob Elliott, playing the interviewer. “For example, here on page 214, it says that Abraham Lincoln was born in 1926 in Bailey’s Mistake, Maine!”
“Well, it’s a big book with a lot of pages,” shrugged Ray Goulding, as the longshoreman-historian. “I’m sure I missed some typos. You can’t catch everything!”
I was reminded of the Bob and Ray skit when I learned that a history book used in 4th Grade in Virginia elementary schools, Our Virginia: Past and Present, teaches that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War, a discredited claim often made by groups seeking to play down slavery’s role as a cause of the South’s rebellion. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 