Education

Comment of the Day: “Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Ethics Alarms post regarding the Harvard-Harris poll showing that Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 had wildly diverging beliefs from the rest of the population in supporting “woke values and victim culture” ended with the plaintive query, “Now what?”

Michael R, in his Comment of the Day to “Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…,” answered the question thusly:

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Hmm… So, maybe you CAN’T allow people who hate this country and what it stands for teach the children. Maybe you CAN’T let them control the media including the news. Maybe you CAN’T let them be hired by the government and take over the 4th branch. We have allowed this for 50 years and now we are surprised by the results.

Who could have predicted this would be the outcome?

Of course, everyone with a brain predicted this at least since the 1970’s. Now, the problem is what to do about it? You can’t fix the education system.

  • You can’t hire teachers that aren’t fixated on spreading the woke mind virus because the people doing the hiring only hire people who have appropriate brain washing.
  • You can’t become a teacher if you don’t support the woke mind virus because the education faculties will throw you out otherwise.
  • Even if the faculty don’t want to throw you out, the professional standards call for DEI, pronoun usage, etc. It is a requirement of the program that you believe these things.
  • If you don’t pledge allegiance to the woke agenda, you don’t meet the requirements of the teacher ed program. Even if that is ignored, the accreditation body would remove the department’s accreditation if they allowed an outsider to become a teacher.
  • Even if you somehow overcame that, the teacher’s union would eliminate any teacher hired who didn’t conform.

There are a couple obvious options.

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Comment of the Day: “The Harvard President’s New Scandal: Now The Only Way Gay Can Prove She’s Fit To Lead The University Is To Leave It”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Wow, those 7 days went by fast! I had flagged this memorable comment by JutGory as a Comment of the Day on the 13th, fully intending to get it up every single day since then, and my plans kept getting derailed (because this is how everything has been going since October around here). Fortunately, this particular entry is timeless, another example of one of my favorite kinds of reader comment, a personal reminiscence with an ethics kick. Also fortunately, the disgrace of Harvard president Claudine Gay, the matter that inspired Jut, is still reverberating. Still, I apologize for my delay.

Here is JutGory’s Comment of the Day on the post, “The Harvard President’s New Scandal: Now The Only Way Gay Can Prove She’s Fit To Lead The University Is To Leave It”:

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I am not sure what to think of allegations of plagiarism.

I am probably both stupid and smart in this regard.

I attended St. John’s College. Plagiarism was hardly an issue. Everything you wrote was supposed to be original. If you wrote about Plato, it did not matter if you failed to attribute criticisms to Aristotle.

No one would plagiarize Aquinas when criticizing Aristotle.

If you plagiarized Plotinus in commenting on Plato, who would know?

The idea was not to research things, it was to think things.

(Amusingly, I attributed to Jesus a quote that was actually one of Rabbi Hillel. Who knew?)

Going into grad school in Philosophy, I was delightfully amused when my Logic Professor was surprised at my course essay. He expected a “book report” sort of essay, while I gave him an original response to the the work. I did not cite anything. Why should I? The thoughts came out of my head, and my name was on the front page of the paper.

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Two Disparate Responses To Being Caught At “Good Discrimination”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Revealed Discriminator 1: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu.

Response: “Deal with it!”

Despite the legitimate uproar over Boston’s Asian-American mayor holding a party that explicitly excluded whites [covered here on Ethics Alarms], Wu and Boston Democrats decided to go with a moldy bunch of lame rationalizations (“it’s no big deal!”…”we’ve been doing it for years”..”we don’t care!”) and not only held the discriminatory event, but proudly issued a photo of it. Naturally, the news media’s reaction is “Republicans pounce!” but long-time conservative pundit Howie Carr, who is usually a bit extreme for my tastes, was spot on, writing in an op-ed for the Boston Herald:

“What if a white mayor had held a whites-only party at a city-owned building, after specifically disinviting all the non-white members of the City Council? It would have been the end of the world, a national story for days if not weeks on end. On the night of the party, there would have been rioting, or looting and violence….had the event been held by a Republican, every GOP politician across the nation would have been asked to denounce it…

Carr added that most of of the ‘state-run media’ in Massachusetts carefully avoided criticizing the party.

The reverse-racists are getting awfully cocky these days.

Revealed Discriminator 2: Harvard

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Now THAT’s Going To Leave A Mark…I Hope!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

[I am especially grateful for this story because it gives me a perfect oportunity to post my favorite John Wayne clip, from “McClintock!”]

One of the scholars that Harvard President Claudine Gay ripped off without proper attribution has issued a full-throated condemnation in the Wall Street Journal. Carol Swain, author, researcher and a retired Vanderbilt professor considered one of the pioneers in the field of race in politics and government doesn’t get into the high weeds of Gay’s pathetic performance before Congress on the matter of her campus’s harassment of Jewish students, focusing instead on the other reason the Harvard diversity hire is demonstrably unqualified for her prestigious position. Swain writes in part,

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Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Geena is right.

A survey conducted this week by Harvard-Harris polling found that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 believe the answer to the Israel-Palestinian conflict is for “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.” The stark contrast between our rising generation and the rest of the American population is truly disturbing. As you can see..

…outside of the demographic that has been indoctrinated into an anti-American, victim-obsessed, extreme progressive ideology by exposure to our education system and social media, the U.S. public is overwhelmingly supportive of Israel and understands that Hamas represents terrorism and genocide. “These individuals siding with evil over democracy should be a wake-up call,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) said, reacting to the poll. “Ideological rot among young Americans, driven by woke values and victim culture, has gotten so bad they’ve convinced themselves to sympathize with actual terrorists who hate America.”

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Ethics Hero: Edelson Law Firm Founder Jay Edelson

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The large plaintiffs’ law firm Edelson PC announced that it will boycott recruiting events at Harvard Law School as a consequence of Harvard University president Claudine Gay’s Congressional testimony shrugging off campus antisemitism as “free speech,” followed by Harvard’s subsequent endorsement of Gay’s leadership. The firm informed Harvard Law’s career services office in a letter that announced the firm will skip the upcoming January law school recruitment as well Harvard’s larger on-campus interviewing event in August, when major firms do their hiring of summer associates.

Firm founder and CEO Jay Edelson explained, “This is not about Harvard law students. This is about the leadership of Harvard and how much of a megaphone it has on the world stage. They should use that megaphone responsibly.” Edelson added, “I understand that this is not going to be as relevant to them than if Skadden Arps pulled out, but I’m hoping they start seeing that even the liberal firms think this is well past a line.”

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After Harvard’s Wagon-Circling: This Will Not End Well….

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

While I was certain that Harvard would not have the integrity or guts to dump its albatross of a president having trapped the university in DEI Hell by selecting a black female social justice warrior in the first place, I have never held any illusions that this reflex circling of the progressive wagons and rote vote of confidence would do anything to slow Harvard’s demise. To be curt: the nation’s most prestigious university—for now—has a flat learning curve.

Isn’t that ironic.

Here are three updates on the ongoing Harvard debacle:

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Fire The Teacher And School Board, Pull Out All The Students, Raze The Building And Sow The Grounds With Salt…But First, GET OUT!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Ugh. Here is another one of those “conservative stories” that so far the progressive media has ignored. I can’t find any non-conservative reports, but it appear to be real. A tenth-grade teacher of “Ethnic Studies World History” at Chief Sealth International High School (Could there be a description that screams “Woke mania!” any more shrilly?) failed a student on a class quiz called “Understanding Gender vs. Sex” because he wrote that only women can become pregnant as an answer to one question and and that only men have penises on another.

According to local radio 770 KTTH, some of the questions on the quiz focused involved personal pronoun use (“When someone uses ‘they/them’ pronouns, what does that mean about their gender identity?”) and stereotypes. (“True/false: Transgender people are gay”). Question 4 asked for a true or false response to the statement, “All men have penises.” The student chose “true” because 99.9% of the time it is true. The teacher marked it incorrect. Question 7 was another true or false question, “Only women can get pregnant.” Again, The same student marked this statement “true” as well. The teacher believes that men can get pregnant, though 99.999999999999999999999+ men throughout history and currently could not and can not.

The child’s mother is perplexed, reportedly telling the Jason Rantz Show on the radio station that her complaints have gone unanswered, and that her son says he has been called “fucked and racist” and “a product of the patriarchy” by teachers in the school.

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I Can’t Resist Posting This Before I Hit The Sack….

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

This was sent to me by Harvard late Sunday night.

Somehow, I doubt that the dangers of ultra-processed foods are really the top priorities in Cambridge right now….

Ethics Quotes Of The Month: Andrew Sullivan, Victor Davis Hanson, And Me

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Before I get to the known and celebrated intellectual pundits, let me begin with what I wrote about Harvard in January of 2021. It is my blog, after all, and people kept telling me I had “drunk the Kool-Aid” and slavishly followed the Fox News narratives. In fact, I have correctly documented the abandonment of ethics by journalists and educators as they chose to become full-time propagandists and allies for the extreme progressive mission to dismantle American values and liberties. I had warned about how far Harvard was straying from its original mission for years before this, but the passage has a nice ring to it this morning:

“Harvard, beginning approximately during the regime of the previous president, Drew Faust, has been infested with serious ethics rot, and it continues to progress. I have documented some, but far from all, of the most disturbing aspects of this process, like the University’s practice of discriminating against Asian-American applicants (as well as whites, of course), which they are now defending in court. What is supposed to be the role model for the entire higher education system in the United States continues to give credence and respectability to unethical practices and values, spreading its own affliction to other institutions far and wide. Worst of all, it is indoctrinating its students to be anti-American, anti-individual rights, anti-Western civilization and culture allies of the radical Left, while attempting to demonize opposing views on campus and off.”

I’ll admit that I didn’t foresee the passive acceptance of anti-Jewish, genocidal hate on Harvard’s campus (Jews are the oppressors now, see, and non-traditionally cast as theNorth America-stealing whites, with Palestinians and Hamas playing the roles of Native Americans), but those who have followed the Harvard saga on Ethics Alarms were better prepared for this revelation than most. I announced in 2021 that I was boycotting my big class reunion in 2022 and wrote why in Harvard’s published compendium of class member updates. Mine was the only such protest: I suppose my reward is that I don’t have to wear a paper bag over my head now.

Andrew Sullivan, the natural conservative who tries so hard to be acceptable to the Left because that’s where all of his LGTBQ friends reside, delivered his ethics quotes in a substack essay, “The Day The Empress’ Clothes Fell Off.” He begins,

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