Education

The Trouble With Teachers Unions

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Los Angeles teachers union is demonstrating the difficult and complex ethical dilemmas endemic to all teachers unions. Because the unions represent teachers rather than their students, the unions can, and often are, placed in the position of supporting their membership to the detriment of the children the members have a duty to serve. And because the teachers who need the most protection from adverse employment actions are usually the worst and least dedicated teachers, a moderation of the unions’ priorities to recognize a duty to the students is less likely to occur.

The L.A. union’s president just announced that he was organizing a “massive boycott” of The Los Angeles Times because the newspaper has begun publishing a series of articles that explore student test scores to assess the effectiveness of Los Angeles public school teachers. Continue reading →

Ethics Verdict on O’Reilly vs. Aniston: O’Reilly’s No Dan Quayle

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Jennifer Aniston is promoting her upcoming comedy “The Switch,” about a single woman who becomes a mother through artificial insemination. In one interview. Aniston commented that “Women are realizing more and more that you don’t have to settle, they don’t have to fiddle with a man to have that child.” This rankled Fox News’ star blowhard Bill O’Reilly, who regarded Aniston’s remark as an endorsement of unwed and under-age motherhood, and told his  cable audience that Aniston was “throwing a message out to 12-year-olds and 13-year-olds that, ‘Hey! You don’t need a guy, you don’t need a dad!” His verdict: “That’s destructive to our society!…Aniston can hire a battery of people to help her, but she cannot hire a dad, okay?” Continue reading →

GQ’s Unethical Rand Paul Smear

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I had a college room mate who used to strip down to his BVD’s and put a traffic cone over his head. Then,using a broom as a baton, he would burst into a room where one of our other room mates was courting a date, and march around singing “Can’t get enough of those Sugar Crisp!”

He’s now a high school principal. Another of my roomies once won a bet by secretly planting a ;large pile of some form of excrement in my bed. He’s a well-respected Wall Street broker. Yet another roommate delighted in jumping out from behind doors, naked, and assaulting us with the painful move known as a “titty-twister. He a runs a construction company, and is the best father I know. And me? I spent much of my college career engineering elaborate practical jokes and capers, including an infamous scheme to steal  the new sofa in the suite of some classmates, which they had stolen from an upperclassman.

Which all goes to show that much of the conduct of college kids, in the insular womb of academia, has nothing to do with the real world, and less than nothing to do with the character, judgment, taste and decorum they will need to demonstrate in their careers and family life. Furthermore, conduct that would be wholly unacceptable and even illegal off campus is hijinks and social experimentation on it. Anyone who doesn’t know that either never went to college, or had a really boring four years there.

It is in this context that the so-called Rand Paul “expose” in Gentleman’s Quarterly is so unfair, so contrived, and such atrocious and unethical journalism. Continue reading →

Ethics, Ethics, Everywhere…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Stories with ethical implications are popping up everywhere, in many fields. I’m running hard to keep up; if you want to join the race, here are some recent developments and notes:

  • A prominent Harvard professor and respected researcher just retracted a major paper and has been put on leave, as an investigation showed irregularities in his methods and results. “This retraction creates a quandary for those of us in the field about whether other results are to be trusted as well, especially since there are other papers currently being reconsidered by other journals as well,’’ wrote one scientist. “If scientists can’t trust published papers, the whole process breaks down.’’
  • A Wisconsin lawyer bought a farm from his own client in a bankruptcy matter, a classic conflict of interest. The lawyer’s defense was amusing: since his license had been suspended, he no longer had a fiduciary duty to his now former client. The court canceled the sale. The story is on the Legal Profession Blog.

Worst Ethics Article Ever!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

On a very strange blog called “Approaching Women is An Art” appears an even stranger post called “Creationism in Schools: an Unethical Approach,” apparently imported from another blog. This essay suggests several possible conclusions: that illiteracy is apparently no bar to writing what purports to be a scholarly essay; that the American educational system has hit rock bottom; that English is an endangered language, and that Ed Wood is alive and blogging. It is also possible, I suppose, that the article was originally written in Mongolian and translated by a fifth grader. Continue reading →

The Strange Case of the Starving Lawyer

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Newly minted and unemployed lawyer Ethan Haines has gone on a hunger strike in the name of all unemployed former law students, to protest misleading law school employment statistics, commercial school rankings, and antiquated career counseling programs. “I designated myself class representative since these students are not able to come forward themselves, for fear that vocalizing their concerns will negatively affect their careers,” he writes on his website. He is alerting various law schools about his Dick Gregory-style protest, intending “to bring awareness to the concerns of law students and recent law graduates by having them addressed by law school administrators. Their primary concerns are inaccurate employment statistics, ineffective career counseling, and rising tuition costs.” The strike, he says, “was motivated by a recent American Bar Association (ABA) investigate Report, which concluded that educational leaders are unable to timely combat the adverse affects of U.S. News’ rankings on legal education.” Continue reading →

Perry v. Schwarzenegger: Choosing Ethics Over Morality

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Predictably, Judge Walker’s decision in Perry v. Schwarzenegger striking down California’s voter approved Proposition 8 has infuriated foes of gay marriage, who have condemned his opinion as judicial activism, a rejection of democratic process, and an agenda-driven farce. Walker himself is being attacked for having a conflict of interest, because he is widely believed to be gay himself. (The belief that a gay judge cannot rule objectively on the issue of gay marriage while a straight judge can is itself an expression of bias.) This is not surprising. What is surprising, at least to me, is that the only substantial argument critics of the opinion can articulate is based on the exact proposition Walker rejected in his opinion: that laws should be able to prohibit conduct based on morality and tradition alone, without quantifiable and verifiable reasons relating to the best interests of society. By insisting that a California law that would withhold a fundamental right—marriage—from a class of Americans must justify itself with reason rather than tradition, Judge Walker ruled that it is ethics, not morality, that should govern American law and justice. Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes: The Billionaires of “The Giving Pledge”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Encouraged by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, more than 30 U.S. billionaires have pledged to give at least half of their fortunes to charity. Buffett and Gates launched The Giving Pledge project in June. The Giving Pledge does not accept money, or try to steer its participants to any particular cause.  Nor is it a contract. The project asks billionaires to make a moral commitment to give away their wealth to charity.

This is clearly the ideal time for such an effort, when state and local governments are fighting deficits and less wealthy donors are having difficulty meeting prior levels of charity. It is also an eloquent statement by a group of productive, talented, hard-working and patriotic Americans that has been unfairly used too often as a cheap political target by the Obama Administration, Congress and the media.

Nothing bad whatsoever can come from The Giving Pledge. Continue reading →

Gallup Poll: Trust in Freefall

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The Gallup poll has released its survey of the public’s trust in various institutions, and also shows whether the public’s trust has increased and decreased over the past year. No surprises: virtually every institution has lost public trust, with only the medical system and big business (which hit a historic low in 2009) improving more than a percentage point.

The bottom of the barrel? Why Congress, naturally. You had to ask?

And the biggest drop in trust since last year, by far, goes to the institution of the Presidency, down 15%. No other institution declined half as much.

For a system of government uniquely dependent on mutual trust, this poll is more than bad news. It is a warning. Continue reading →

Doctors and the Deadly Anti-Snitch Reflex

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Everybody, or almost everybody, hates to report friends and colleagues for misconduct. This is the anti-snitch reflex, a strongly programmed response from childhood. Telling authorities about the misconduct of others sets off internal alarms that have been installed by parents and peer groups, ensuring that we feel terrible if we “tattletale.” This is betrayal, a violation of loyalty, and most of all, a breach of the Golden Rule: we’d never want anyone to snitch on us.

For professionals, however, this reflex is false, mistaken and even deadly. The duty to report dishonest public employees, crooked cops, unethical lawyers, conflicted accountants, self-dealing business executives, fraudulent researchers and others in the workplace—even if they are colleagues and friends—trumps childhood codes, personal loyalty and general discomfort. There is nothing noble or admirable about allowing innocent people to entrust their life and livelihood with untrustworthy professionals. Nevertheless, a disturbing large proportion of all professionals can’t bring themselves to do the right thing when it comes to the core ethical duty of stopping workplace dishonesty, incompetence or corruption when it involves a colleague.

A recent survey of doctors is not comforting, but it confirms the problem. Continue reading →