Education

Ethics Alarms Usually Concentrates On The Unethical Conduct Of Current Senators, But In The Case Of Kyrsten Sinema I’ll Make An Exception…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I was glad to see the often rogue Democrat/Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema leave Congress and my ethics scrutiny because she was a one-woman EA spelling landmine: I always wanted to spell her first name “Krysten” and her last name “Cinema.” But a federal judge last week cleared the way for a the wife of a man she had been having an affair with while she was a U.S. Senator to litigate a North Carolina “homewrecker” lawsuit against her.

Good.

To be fair, Ethics Alarms had extolled Sinema a couple times in the past, most recently in 2021, when I wrote:

“Totalitarianism takes a hit! Is it fatal? Senator Krysten Sinema (D-Az) is suddenly evil in the eyes of progressives hoping to ram through SCOTUS packing, gun restrictions, D.C. statehood, HR One and other measures designed to make the US a one party, European-style nanny state until the stars turn cold. She announced that she is unalterably opposed to eliminating the filibuster, meaning that it’s probably here to stay, at least for a while. The ethical response to this development would be for the two parties to stop insisting on extreme positions, and work toward compromises, as our system was designed to foster. Nah.”

Nonetheless, Sinema carried on a sexual affair with her bodyguard (heh!), leading to his divorce. Sinema’s lawyers had asked U.S. District Judge David A. Bragdon to toss the suit, arguing she had no meaningful ties to North Carolina and had conducted her affair with Matthew Ammel entirely in other states. Bragdon, rejected that account in a 13-page order.

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Labor Day Weekend Ethics Inventory [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Two “the rest of the story” items to kick things off:

  • As we all hoped would be the case, MLB reprimanded umpire Doug Eddings for telling rookie St. Louis Cardinals rookie reliever Hancel Rincon to straighten his cap and to “Grow the hell up!” Eddings issued an apology. EA covered the episode here. But last night, as many suggested, many Cardinals wore their caps askew as a visual rebuke to Eddings, who was the umpire at third base. Interestingly, some of the Colorado Rockies had their caps tilted as well. Eddings claimed that he admonished Rincon because a Rockies batter, Hunter Goodman, flagged the rakish angle of the young pitcher’s headgear. Goodman, however denies that he said anything.

See? I said this was an ethics train wreck!

  • In this post, EA discussed the absurd controversy involving “Stars and Stripes” staff maintaining that they were “independent” of the Pentagon. In a 24-page ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden turned down the entreaty by the newspaper’s publisher, editor-in-chief and Middle East reporter to stay their firings while a lawsuit challenging the terminations as First Amendment violations works its way through the court system.  McFadden found the government probably did not violate their First Amendment rights by firing them. I think their claim came perilously close to being a frivolous suit. If it were to prevail, no reporter or journalist could be fired by a government publication for an inflammatory or anti-American output because it could be framed as “censorship.” Editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and reporter Lara Korte told CBS in an interview that they “worked for Stars and Stripes, “not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker.” They were asserting total independence and autonomy, despite being a Pentagon publication and funded by tax-payers.

Meanwhile…

1. The NFL is increasingly ridiculous, and I continue to wonder when it’s core audience will just say, “Enough already! Bye!” The league’s woke virtue signaling and DEI embrace is obnoxious, but its recent decision that football needs screamingly fey male cheerleaders boggles the mind. Look at this guy:

What the hell? I find female NFL cheerleaders an embarrassment, but this…any idea what the NFL is going for here or why? Tim O’Brien writes in part,

“I mean, who in the world asked for this? What market research told the NFL that what it really needed to do was complement all that toxic masculinity during the game with this? Seriously, are gay men a viable market for the NFL? How big is that market? Perhaps even more pointedly, as a percentage, how many not just gay men, but flaming gay men, watch the NFL on Sundays? Are we missing something? …[T]he NFL continues to find ways to alienate me and the millions of others who tune in because all we want to do is watch good football, see a little patriotism, and get a dose of a high-energy, traditional game-day atmosphere, nothing more….All of it is telling me the NFL no longer wants or needs people like me as fans. I’m cool with that, but if I have one message for the league, it’s this: “Be careful what you wish for.”

The NFL is already the most unethical sports league in existence (after the WNBA, of course). More on that tomorrow.

2. Speaking of the WNBA, ESPN’s headline was “Cathy Engelbert, who oversaw WNBA boom, to retire as commissioner.” It could well have read, “Cathy Engelbert, who proved completely incapable of leading the WNBA as it found itself immersed in racial and gender controversies, is running away. Good.” “Over the years, it has been amazing to watch WNBA players thrive and lead the massive cultural surge around women’s sports,” Engelbert said in a statement. “I retire knowing we have built something bigger, stronger and more enduring than we could have imagined. I am grateful to the WNBA and NBA team owners and staff, players, investors, fans and the powerhouse league office staff, who believed in what this league could become. I retire with immense gratitude and tremendous optimism for the future of the WNBA, with the best yet to come.”

Englebert is an accountant, and served as the CEO of Deloitte. She was brought in to develop the WNBA as a business, but had no skills or orientation that qualified her to deal with the league’s image and public relations problems. It took some gall for her to talk about the surge in “women’s sports” as so many of her league’s coaches speak as if they don’t know what a woman is.

Players and coaches have described her as “negligent.” One player said that the WNBA had the “worst leadership in the world.” From my observations, this was a severely limited leader who saw her job in the narrowest possible terms. She was hired to cut business deals and make money for the owners. She was good at that. Meanwhile, under her stewardship the WNBA has acquired the reputation of being dominated by lesbian thugs who resent the few white heterosexuals in their midst.

Maybe the WNBA should acquire the NFL’s gay cheerleaders…

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Ethics Hero: Tuskegee University President Dr. Mark Brown

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Now and then there are moments when I feel that indeed I have not lived in vain.

Tuskegee University president Dr. Mark Brown (above), a retired Air Force major general, issued a memo to all students of the “traditional black institution” this academic year declaring that all students will be required to follow a dress code right out of 1962.

“The university has developed a new policy for student attire on campus, classroom attendance, and cell phone use in classrooms,” Brown wrote in a message to students. “Tuskegee students now have a dress code for public and professional places. The Student Handbook requires students to arrive on campus with a business suit and proper shoes for a business meeting. Students are prohibited from wearing revealing clothing in class, to the cafeteria or in official settings like Convocation. They are also not able to wear bedroom shoes, bonnets, or du-rags to class or the cafeteria. The goal here is not meant to restrict you from enjoying the Tuskegee Experience, but to prepare you with a solid foundation for the workforce you will enter once you leave Tuskegee. Employers are less forgiving and too often presentation may overrule stellar preparation.”

“Tuskegee University continues to prepare the best and brightest for a lifetime of success,” Brown added. “With these changes, we want to ensure every student is as prepared as they can be. I look forward to seeing you in August.”

To which I say,

Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?

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Ethics Quiz: The Law Student’s AI Query

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I am something of a persona non grata on the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers (because I’m on to them, and they know it) listserv, but the list still has its uses. For example, one of the more ethical ethics lawyers circulated a question he received from a student in his legal ethics class regarding the use of artificial intelligence in class:

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Ethics Quote of the Month: New Mexico Supreme Court Justice C. Shannon Bacon

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“Do you watch the news? Do you listen to the radio? Do you read anything about what’s going on in the world? Because the problem with lawyers relying on AI hallucinations is an above-the-fold story every single day.So either you have buried your head in the sand … and that’s an intentional choice to be uninformed, or you took a gamble, and neither of those are consistent with the code of conduct.”

—-New Mexico Supreme Court Justice C. Shannon Bacon excoriating lawyer Stephen Aarons for submitting a brief riddled with ChatGPT “hallucinations.”

Good for her, but still not strong enough.

Aarons’ brief included references to imaginary witnesses and fake testimony from at least one real witness. That AI bots are likely to make up case cites and even statutory language has been recognized and publicized widely, not just in legal publications but in the general news media since early 2024. Lawyers, including those with large national law firms like Morgan & Morgan and even the Justice Department continuing to file these bogus bot-authored court documents is amazing to me. And they are too stupid, ignorant and lazy to even proof-read what the bots wrote! One judge recently railed specifically at using ChatGPT for legal work, which he compared to using Mad Magazine as a legal reference.

Bacon threw the metaphorical book at Aarons, removing him as attorney from the case of a 60-year-old man convicted last year of murdering his wife, found him in contempt of court, ordered him to pay $5,000 to a client protection fund, and referred him to the bar for potential discipline. The murder appeal will be handled now by a public defender.

It isn’t just lawyers, of course, who deserve tongue-lashings like this. Teachers, professors, newspaper editors, legislators, politicians, screenwriters, and, yes, judges to name just a few of the affected groups have an obligation to keep up-to-date on the AI revolution, and a disturbing number of them are not even close, which is inexcusable.

Two veteran members of Congress, Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. James Clyburn recently indicated that they were ill-informed regarding AI. That this is, frighteningly, not unusual shouldn’t give us any comfort. Lawmakers are notorious for taking an inordinate amount of time to understand new developing technology, as when the late Senator Ted Stevens, while chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, described the internet as a “series of tubes.” Like the internet but perhaps even more so, however, artificial intelligence is a civilization-altering (and perhaps -threatening) phenomenon moving at the speed of light. Those who are too dim, indolent, unimaginative and irresponsible to keep up need to get out of the way and retire to some nice, safe, quiet pursuit like beachcombing or golf.

Oh…it’s the Rules of Professional Conduct, Your Honor, not the “code.” Judges have ethics codes. Lawyers haven’t been governed by a “code” for 40 years.

Try to keep up.

Unethical Quote of the Week: Dr. Kemi Doll

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“I want to be clear that I don’t care whether any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true. None of them were worth his career.”

—-Author Kemi Doll, MD, in a New England Journal of Medicine article this month titled, “Jason Arday and the Perils of Being Black in Academia.”

Can you believe that quote? Astounding, unreal, incredible. (As a side note, what the heck is the New England Journal of Medicine doing publishing an article about a Cambridge University scamster given a position on the faculty based mostly on his color and secondarily on his transparently fantastic biographical claims and stolen scholarship?)

Doll’s statement literally stands for the elimination of integrity, merit, honesty and accountability as core standards of Western civilization, replacing them with…what, exactly? Feelings? Artificial virtue? Group-based advancement?

I suppose this chart…

.

..helps explain how a medical journal author would write such crap, but it doesn’t explain what overdose of cracked ideology, indoctrination, group-think and incipient brain rot was necessary to get us to this point.

As I have already written here a few times, I am sick of the Arday story, but we cannot be sick of what it signifies because it is too important to ignore. As Glenn Greenwald wrote, “One cannot honestly defend Arday either for his deceptions or his apparent suicide. And, in fact, no one really is. What the protesters and petitioners are doing is defending themselves. University administrators, professors, writers, and other liberals are out in the streets screaming at the press for revealing the depths of elite academia’s racism, gullibility, and dishonesty. They’re focusing on the media to take themselves out of the spotlight.”

Bingo.

Comment of the Day: “Making Ethics Sense of the Jason Arday Saga”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Ryan Harkins contributed the second Comment of the Day to grace EA’s cyber-pages today, and like the earlier one by Humble Talent, it is excellent. Since the topic is Jason Arday, I believe I am allowed to give a brief update on this latest story of the academic world’s DEI disgrace:

  • In a substack essay, Max Klinger wrote about his experience in the Cambridge department that later hired Arday for its faculty. He wrote in part, “I studied in the academic department at Cambridge that later employed Jason Arday. Here’s just some of the crap I learned: For one module, I wrote a lengthy essay about how cultural products like kids’ cartoons and jazz songs serve as instruments of capitalist oppression. I got a top mark on that paper (despite knowing at the time that I was essentially regurgitating complete crap).While studying for another paper I had a debate with the professor, an eminent anthropologist, because she insisted that native tribes could fly through the trees – not metaphorically, but that they could literally fly because they believed they could fly. After all, who are we to question ‘indigenous ways of knowing’…For a different course, I read long ‘research papers’ which argued that the fact that black kids are excluded from schools more than white kids proves systemic racism exists in education. Crucially, they ignored the fact that white kids are excluded more than, e.g., Japanese kids, a statistic which, applying the exact same logic, would suggest that the education system is systemically biased in favour of, erm, Japanese kids (which obviously it isn’t)…”
  • The United States Mission to Belgium, under U.S. Ambassador Bill White, released a statement condemning Ghent University for retaliating against the American scholar who blew the metaphorical whistle on Arday’s plagiarism. “The United States government regularly funds and supports research, academic exchanges, and other engagements with overseas universities,” it said in part. “Dishonest, corrupt institutions that engage in, or reward, scapegoating mob behavior are not desirable partners for us. This is particularly true where the purpose and effect of the scapegoating is to punish accurate journalism unearthing academic dishonesty. We are therefore reviewing any relationships we have with Ghent University.” Good. No Democratic administration would do this, and you know why.
  • So far, there has been no report on what was Arday’s cause of death. Everyone assumes he took his own life, but no information has been forthcoming on how, if indeed he did. I find that strange. But then everything about this sad tale is strange.

Now here’s Ryan Harkins’ Comment of the Day on the post, “Making Ethics Sense of the Jason Arday Saga”:

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Sorry! A Jason Arday Ethics Train Wreck Update Because Attention Should Be Paid

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

There should be lots of topics to discuss on today the Friday Open Forum, which is going up next, but first, despite having promised to never post on the nauseating Jason Arday mess again, events dictate that I have to break that promise, because not doing my job regarding the EA mission would be more unethical than breaking a promise based on a premise that turned out to be false. It’s an ethics conflict. (I wonder why MAGA types have so much trouble with the concept. President Trump has delivered on a higher percentage of his campaign promises than any President since James K. Polk, and yet defectors like Tucker Carlson and Margery Taylor Greene—who would want to be a member of that club?— are furious because he started a necessary war that should have been started about 50 years ago. Morons.)

But I digress. Over in Europe, which stands as a frightening example of how quickly cultures can lose core values, Nathan Cofnas, who was the first to extensively expose Arday an academic fraud, announced that he has been suspended by Ghent University in Belgium and expects to be fired. His offense? “Discrimination”—-meaning that pointing out that a black academic star that Cambridge University had created out of DEI nothingness was in truth a serial plagiarist was racist. The school rector, Petra De Sutter issued a statement on l’affaire Arday asserting that freedom of speech “is not unlimited. It goes hand in hand with responsibility and may be restricted in order to protect the rights of others.”

Tell us more about the freedom to lie to the public and jump in line in front of genuine scholars because of one’s color, Petra!

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Now THIS Is Indoctrination

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Oregon State University mandates that undergraduates complete two courses on “Difference, Power & Oppression,” as part of its “Core Education” curriculum, including “Difference, Power & Oppression Foundations” and “Difference, Power & Oppression Advanced.”

The university demands that all students take these courses so students can master the art of disrupting oppressive systems in the United States and around the world. After all, the Orwelians explain, “The inequitable distribution of social, economic, and political power in the United States and globally is sustained through systems of oppression, which represent a variety of discriminatory institutional beliefs and practices…beliefs and practices [that] obscure the origins and operations of systemic oppression in daily life, such that this inequitable power distribution is assumed to be the natural order…Such examinations will enhance and promote responsible, ethical, and anti-racist engagement by preparing students to understand and disrupt these systems as they manifest in their field.”

There is no way to spin this. Oregon State, a public university, is requiring any graduate to have their brain washed in order to graduate and get a degree. There is also no way to defend it, or the oppressive and anti-American ideology that has spawned such totalitarian tactics.

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On Plagiarism…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Guest Column by Michael R.

[Introduction: This comment by Michael R, in response to the Jason Arday post, “On The Left’s Horrifying Lack Of Integrity In The Wake of The Arday Scandal: I’m Sorry I Was So Right, And How I Wish I Were Wrong. Now What?” is sufficiently extensive and covers such an umortant ethics issue that I deem it worthy of a Guest Column. He begins by referencing the “Everybody Does It” attempted exoneration of the late Cambridge fraudster Facebook post that was favored on the platform by my old friend, a history professor who should know better but who is apparently completely woke-blinded…]

To your long-time Georgetown history professor, you can reply that all he has done is demonstrate why the left has lost all credibility. He thinks he is showing how it is fine to plagiarize. All the has shown is that those institutions no longer care about academic rigor and have no credibility.

Now about the plagiarism. There are different grades of plagiarism. Let me explain why the current round of plagiarism is so devastatingly bad.

When I was in grad school, many of us were asked to carefully check the introduction chapters of foreign students’ dissertations. Because of the difficulty of writing in a foreign language and the differing intellectual property standards in different cultures, there was a lot of plagiarism and the advisors were very careful to detect it and get it corrected before the defense. This is a mockup of a typical Asian student’s introduction.

“Poorly worded original sentence. Sentence directly copied from source 1. Two sentences directly copied from source 2. Poorly worded original sentence tying the thoughts together.Four sentences from source 3. One sentence from source 1. One sentence from source 4. A poorly worded original sentence tying them together. Rinse and repeat.”

You can see what is going on. They lack the English language skills to really blend the thoughts from the different sources together, so they just copy whole sentences (occasionally paragraphs) from many sources and tie them together with some original sentences. This is plagiarism, but this is pretty easy to fix. They are writing a typical intro, they just aren’t doing the paraphrasing and integration of the ideas needed. We would work with the students to get this fixed so that there weren’t any problems. There are probably a lot of programs that didn’t do this, resulting in a massive amount of plagiarism. I am fairly sure this is pretty common in dissertations, especially the Introduction chapters (which are typically reviews of the literature and not original research).

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