Education

Grading The Harvard Crimson’s Pro- and Anti-Claudine Gay Editorials [Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Breaking! Minutes after I posted this, the Harvard Crimson announced that Harvard president Claudine Gay is resigning.

Harvard’s daily campus newspaper, the venerable Harvard Crimson, currently has two editorials and one student op-ed up regarding the President Claudine Gay scandal, aka The Harvard President Ethics Train Wreck, in which the new president, the first black and only the second woman ever to hold the post, faces duel crises of confidence regarding her leadership. The first is her stuttering and inadequate response to anti-Jewish demonstrations on campus, low-lighted by her evasive and cringe-worthy testimony before Congress. The second is the subsequent revelation that Gay engaged in plagiarism in multiple scholarly works to a degree that would get her school’s students sanctioned.

In an official editorial, “President Gay Plagiarized, but She Should Stay. For Now,” a majority of the editorial board argues that,

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 6: Pot Users

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The status of marijuana in the U.S. is a mess, with the drug still being illegal under federal law and the states slowly sliding down the slippery slope to legalization, because they see revenue in it. The confusion is going to get worse before it gets better. Ohio was the only state to legalize marijuana for “recreational use” last year. The Kentucky General Assembly legalized medical marijuana this year, but patients will have to wait until 2025 for the program to kick in. Voters in Oklahoma rejected the legalization of recreational marijuana in last March, and Hoosiers voted against legal marijuana in Indiana in early April.

The Department of Health and Human Services sent its latest findings on marijuana to the Drug Enforcement Administration, recommending that it be reclassified as a Schedule III drug. That classification would mean that the substance has a “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” However, I wouldn’t trust the now thoroughly woke HHS to do an unbiased study on the topic, since the most stoned American are progressives and Democrats. Throughout the last few years, there have been various studies suggesting that the drug is not as harmless as its proponents have been claiming it is, and there is enough evidence of heavy use of pot causing long-term cognitive problems to tell me that we still don’t know what lurks in the genie’s bottle.

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Comment of the Day: “Scary and Unethical Reactions to the Hamas-Israel War on the Left and Right”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day was almost the last comment on this blog in 2023, and is an appropriate first COTD in 2024. I called it the “Comment of the Year” in my initial response, and though I haven’t done the homework to go back through all the year’s Comments of the Day to make that an official decision, his opus is certainly worthy of that honor.

Don’t waste your time with my introduction: Steve’s post is long, but both perceptive and a useful guide to some of what lies ahead.

Here is Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Scary and Unethical Reactions to the Hamas-Israel War on the Left and Right.”

***

You don’t understand anti-Semitism?

You don’t give yourself enough credit. There isn’t that much to understand about it. It’s simple hatred of “the other,”especially “the other” who does well.

Throughout their 4,000 years or more of history, the Jewish people have always been “the other.” In ancient days they were “the other” because they worshiped one god while almost all the other people of the Middle East worshiped several. In the days of the Greek and Roman empires they were “the other” because they refused to assimilate the way many conquered peoples did. The Greeks tried to impose their own culture on the Jews and got the Maccabean revolt for trying. The Romans tried to take the Jews into the firm the way they’d taken many others in. They were never fully successful, and after one revolt too many the Romans dispersed them, creating the province of Palestine.

In Christian Europe they were “the other” partly because of their different faith, partly because they were closed off from most professions and closed themselves off socially. In the Muslim Ottoman Empire they were “the other” for the same reasons. The majority never likes “the other” much, and it did not help that one of the few businesses the Jews were allowed to engage in was moneylending. Moneylenders are not well liked. It did not help either that the Jews were usually merchants and moneylenders who did better than the European non-noble classes or the Muslims, who were mostly farmers and small shopkeepers.

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Obama’s Favorite Songs: An Often Ignored Insidious Form of “Fake News”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Among the Ethics Alarms long-promised essays that have yet to be posted (you never know when one will finally pop up!) is the Ethics Alarms Fake News Directory. A story that has ended up on many MSM news sources reminded me of why what I thought it would be an easy list to compile turned into a chore. It has appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, Rolling Stone, Variety, CNN, the Hill, the Chicago Sun -Times, Yahoo!, AOL and dozens—yes dozens— more. The breathlessly urgent story: Barack Obama shared his list of favorite songs for 2023, or, as the Post put it, “Obama’s 2023 bangers include Beyoncé, Burna Boy and Blondshell.”

There was real news about Obama recently: several conservative-leaning news sources like the New York Post and Fox News reported that the ex-President had lobbied Harvard’s governing body to keep unqualified serial plagiarist Claudine Gay as president of Obama’s alma mater. Of course, the “good” media didn’t see that as newsworthy, or felt that the public didn’t need to know about it. Instead, many of them chose to treat Obama’s annual favorite music list as worthy of breaking news treatment.

This is favoritism and propaganda by innuendo. Only a celebrity presumed to be deserving of top of the cognitive dissonance scale status can get such treatment. The publications that printed this non-news as news are pushing readers to adopt their position: this is an inarguably good and great man of iconic stature, and so attention should be paid to his every thought, statement and opinion. It is a familiar media propaganda tactic and was one of the ways the news media propped up Obama during his mediocre terms as President (and I’m being kind) when they treated his college basketball tournament bracket choices as worthy of attention. These same news sources didn’t think the Hunter Biden laptop discovery was news in the middle of a hotly-contested election, nor did it rush to cover an accusation by a former Biden Senate staffer that he had raped her, but the music playlist of a politician with no special expertise in music at all—at least Bill Clinton played the saxophone—warranted coverage.

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Believe It Or Not! The Best “Naked Teacher Principle” Variation Yet: The Porn Actor University Chancellor!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I was tipped off to this story, which I hereby designate a Ripley, yesterday, and regret not getting it up before the rest of the news media and blogosphere caught up.

The Universities of Wisconsin Board of Regents voted unanimously this week to fire longtime UW-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow. UW System President Jay Rothman said the university leadership had discovered “specific conduct”that caused harm to the university’s reputation. 

The “specific conduct” was appearing in online porn videos with his wife.

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“This is Basil. Though He Is a PhD, a Professor, and a Democratic Political Consultant, Bias Has Made Him Stupid and Ridiculous. Won’t You Give a Tax-Deductable Donation to Help Us Find a Cure For Basil and Victims Like Him?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

 Confirmation bias may be the most destructive bias of them all, creeping into the best of minds and casing them to malfunction wildly, and, in tragic cases like that of Basil Smilke, causing them to say and do things that destroy their credibility while making them look ridiculous. This is the bias that makes human beings see and believe what they want to see and believe when a conflicting reality is right in front of them.

I actually did a Danny Thomas spit-take when I read Smilke’s opinion column on CNN’s website titled, “Kamala Harris is not a liability. She may be Democrats’ best weapon.” I got a mouthful of coffee on Spuds, who was lying on me, and he was not pleased. Reading the headline, I was prepared to see that the crazy thing had been authored by a student at Madame Louisa’s Home for the Bewildered, but no. Smilke appears to be well credentialed and to have all his faculties, not that being a professor and director of the Public Policy Program at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute of Hunter College is the highest step on the academic ladder, but hey: Hunter has more credibility than Harvard, and it doesn’t allow plagiarism.

Now, I recognize that Smilke is also a Democratic Party political operative and consultant, so there is an alternate explanation for the piece that doesn’t make him look like a confirmation bias-infected moron. He could be lying to the public and to Kamala Harris in the hopes of getting a job. That would be unethical, of course, but then he’s a Democratic Party political operative and  consultant.

His opinion piece—and why would even CNN publish something this absurd?—reads like it was written under the influence of some powerful mind-altering drug. Here is his argument:

  • Harris has been unfairly savaged by Republicans and conservatives (and a substantial number of Democrats, but he doesn’t mention that) because she is a black woman. It’s all sexism and racism. “Biden’s second-in-command, a former US senator and California attorney general, is being dragged down by a barrage of tropes, the kinds of chatter that many women and racial minorities frequently confront in politics.”

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The Campus Race-Baiters’ Favorite Things

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

College Fix, which has been the source of several EA posts this year, has provided an amusing (or depressing) compendium of 71 people, places and things that “were declared racist or in need of ‘anti-racist’ action” by academics or on college campuses. The list is, shall we say, provocative and revealing. Here are 25 of my favorites and their links; Ethics Alarms covered some of them:

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Unethical Quote of the Month: Vince Beiser, Professor Frances DeLaurentis and “Georgetown Law Magazine”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

One of the main occupational hazards of being an ethicist and writing this blog is that my ethics Spidey-sense can’t be turned off. This is why anything from TV commercials to an old re-run of “Three’s Company” to a kid leaving an e-scooter by the side of the road can trigger an ethical analysis. This is not a fun way to go through life, but “this is the life I have chosen.”

It may be that the passage in the Georgetown Law Center alumni magazine started my head clanging like the crocodile’s in “Peter Pan” when the alarm clock he swallowed goes off wouldn’t have bothered me if I had I not just reviewed all the unethical quotes of 2023 an hour before reading “AI and the Law” in the Fall 2023 issue (which just arrived last week, a full season late). I don’t think so, however. Here it is:

“Students might well use the [AI]technology to cheat, but at this point stopping them is difficult….And in any case, students have always cheated; in a way, AI may even help level the playing field. ‘AI puts kids who don’t have Uncle Alito to call for help with their take-home exam on an equal footing with those who do,’ says [Prof. Frances] DeLaurentis.”

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Harvard’s Claudine Gay Scandal Just Keeps Getting Better, Though I Guess We Shouldn’t Be Surprised That An Unethical University Uses Unethical Lawyers

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

It’s really a shame that I have to post this today, when the Ethics Alarms traffic consists largely of metaphorical tumbleweeds blowing down the empty dusty streets. However, we know most of the news media is trying to bury the series of revelations that prove that the leader of higher education rot hired an unqualified president because she was black, female, and a DEI agent, and that because she is black and female, Harvard is employing lies, excuses and rationalizations to avoid dumping her when a white male president who had been revealed as a plagiarist in scholarship and a blathering fool before Congress would have been fired in a flash.

I know this blog is a small, tinny voice in the vast wilderness, but it’s something.

Above you see excerpts from a 15 page letter sent to the New York Post threatening to sue on Harvard’s behalf if the paper continued to report the discovery by conservative reporter Christopher Rufo and others that Gay had plagiarized the works of other scholars by using their words and ideas as her own without attribution in dozens of instances, including her Harvard dissertation. The Post points out that Harvard, through its attorneys at Clare Locke, stated that there was no plagiarism and that the allegations were false before Harvard had bothered to investigate the claims. This also means that Gay approved of the letter, which she knew was itself “demonstrably false”:

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Ethics Quote of the Month: 2022 Nobel Prize Recipient Philip H. Dybvig

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Commenting on Harvard’s increasingly apparent appointment of an under-qualified, diversity hire as the university’s president, Dr. Dybvig, who was a co-winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “for research on banks and financial crises,” said,

‘‘I realize I have been too pure. I assumed that a lot of people shared my dream (expressed for example by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King) of ending oppression. However, the dream of most people (especially but not exclusively the oppressed) seems to be becoming the oppressor. This is why there is a strong correlation between abusers of children and people who were abused as children.  Claudine Gay has power now and she is the oppressor of any group not favored by her and other people in power. This is a common pattern in governments heading for totalitarianism. First, say you represent the oppressed. Then you get power and oppress non-favored groups. This leaves you in a morally indefensible position that could not survive given free speech, so you do what you can to destroy anyone (“counterrevolutionaries”) who disagrees with your narrative.’’

In related commentary, Jason Riley wrote in the Wall Street Journal in answer to the question of why Harvard can’t and won’t fire Gay, “To admit she has performed poorly is to raise basic questions about the entire ‘diversity’ enterprise.” Prof. Glenn Reynolds, commenting on both pieces, suggests that there are benefits “for her to remain as a lasting discredit to Harvard.” I agree with that as well. The mask has dropped, and all can see (who are willing to see) the ugliness beneath.