Education

“Curmie’s Conjectures”: The Revenge of the Wackadoodles

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

by Curmie

One of my favorite lines from the late singer/songwriter Warren Zevon is “Just when you thought it was safe to be bored / Trouble waiting to happen.”  That lyric came to mind when I happened across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Hamline President Goes on the Offensive.”Well, that lyric and one of my most oft-used phrases, “Oh, bloody hell!”. 

This rather lengthy article—over 3000 words—deserves to be read in its entirety, even if it involves a registration process for free access to a limited number of articles per month, but I’ll try to hit the highlights here.  The author is Mark Berkson, the Chair of the Religion Department at Hamline University.  His was for a very long while the only voice, or at least the only audible one, on the Hamline campus to come to the defense of erstwhile adjunct art history professor Erika López Prater as she was being railroaded by the school’s administration on absurd charges of Islamophobia.

You may recall the incident.  Jack first wrote about it here; my take came a little later, here.  Dr. López Prater was teaching a course in global art history, in which she showed images of a couple of paintings depicting the prophet Muhammad.  Recognizing that there are some strains of Islam in which viewing such images is regarded as idolatrous, she made it clear both in the course syllabus and on the day of the lecture in question that students who chose not to look at those particular photos were free not to do so, without penalty.

Ah, but that left too little room for victimhood.  So student Aram Wedatalla blithely ignored those warnings and (gasp!) saw those images… or at least she says she did, which is not necessarily the same thing.  Wounded to the core by her own sloth and/or recklessness, she then howled to the student newspaper and, urged on by Nur Mood, the Assistant Director of Social Justice Programs and Strategic Relations (also the advisor to the Muslim Student Association, of which Wedatalla was president), to the administration.  The banner was then raised high by one David Everett, the Associate Vice President of Inclusive Excellence.  (Those folks at Hamline sure do like their pretentious job titles, don’t they?)

Anyway, Everett proclaimed in an email sent to literally everyone at Hamline that López Prater  had been “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”  To be fair, he didn’t identify her by name, but there weren’t a lot of folks teaching global art history.  Everett was just getting warmed up.  He subsequently co-authored, or at least jointly signed, a statement with university president Fayneese Miller that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.”  Not at any university worthy of the name, it shouldn’t.  Anyway, López Prater was de facto fired, because destroying the careers of scholars for even imaginary offenses has become a blood sport for administrators (and, in public colleges, for politicians).

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Brava Brianna Coppage, The Sort-Of Ethical Naked Teacher

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

That’s Brianna in all three photos.

As stated right above in the Ethics Alarms Glossary, The Naked Teacher Principle: states that “a secondary school teacher or administrator (or other role model for children) who allows pictures of himself or herself to be widely publicized, as on the web, showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses, cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result.” The NTP, as we call it for short, has been a staple of Ethics Alarms from the beginning…well, a little after the beginning, since the first installment of the series goes back to the old Ethics Scoreboard, which is still up for your edification and entertainment, here. The first Naked Teacher was Tamara Hoover, whom I discussed in 2005. On Ethics Alarms, the NTP, in addition to its classic versions, has many sundry variations, all of which can be found here. An unexpected variation just surfaced last month, with the “The Naked Porn-Performing Political Candidate Principle.”

But Brianna Coppage, the soon to be ex-English at St. Clair High School in St. Clair, Mo., is in one respect the perfect Naked Teacher by Ethics Alarms standards. After all, she understands how the NTP works and why.

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Saturday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, Oct. 7, 2023: It’s Not Like The Old Saturday Morning Cartoons, But It Will Have To Do…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Some upsetting ethics episodes, like a Democratic Congressman behaving like a 7th grade jerk, lying about it, and being supported by his party and the news media, and this story, sufficiently monopolized my time and thoughts this week that quite a few issues and stories that need exposing risk being left behind…so here we are.

And I find myself wishing there was some Saturday morning adult TV equivalent to the old array of Saturday morning entertainment shows for kids that used to begin my weekends when I was just a sprout. Those shows above were actually a later generation’s (inferior) options. For me, my Saturday mornings were affirmatively weird, including non-cartoon fare like Andy Devine’s show (“Twang your magic twanger, Froggie!”), Ventriloquist Paul Winchell with his dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smith (why Edgar Bergen didn’t sue, I’ll never know) , lisping vaudevillian Pinkie Lee (“Hello, it’s me! My name is Pinky Lee! With a checkered hat and a checkered coat, a funny tickle in my throat, and a silly laugh like a billy goat…”) and of course, “The Howdy Doody Show.” Cheap Hanna-Barbara cartoons were just starting to take over: “The Adventures of Ruff and Reddy” was the camel’s nose in the tent.

Well, maybe I’ll see if I can get early morning Saturday ethics entertainment up on Ethics Alarms for adults and ethics-minded teens needing stimulation. I guarantee it will be better than “The Banana Splits.”

1. Trick or Treat! Where to begin? Well, Halloween has become a frolic for The Great Stupid in recent years, and 2023’s scary days are starting off in a similar vein. In my increasingly silly state of Massachusetts (which is considering killing Columbus Day and replacing it with “Indigenous Peoples Day”) the Northboro Public Schools sent a letter to parents this week noting that students aren’t allowed to wear costumes to school for Halloween and the traditional parade through the hallways was canceled. Why? Oh, come on, it’s easy. DEI! The banning of the Halloween fun will supposedly advance the district’s “core values of equity and inclusion.” How, nobody would say. Instead of costumes and a parade, the school district told parents that students would participate in a “Fall-themed spirit day.” Catchy! I feel more inclusive already. Still, nobody really explained why not letting kids dress up in costumes one day a year advances “diversity, equity and inclusion.” One knee-jerk woke parent quizzed about it ventured, “There is the money aspect: Not everyone can afford a Halloween costume.” BUZZZZZZZ! Wrong, Equity Face. Great Halloween costumes require creativity, not money. Schools are supposed to cultivate creativity. Dumb, woke, incompetent people are running public schools, and the result is going to be more dumb, woke, incompetent citizens.

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Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Quiz: The Rehabilitated Brain-Eating Cannibal”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I did not, when I decided that the saga of Tyree Smith justified an ethics quiz, foresee that the story neatly dovetailed into a larger theme covered extensively by ethics alarms of late, the untrustworthiness of “experts” and the danger of blindly accepting their pronouncements, influenced as they too often are by ideological biases and political agendas. Longtime commenter Michael R., however (3, 425 comments since October 26, 2012!) managed to connect the dots.

Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quiz: The Rehabilitated Brain-Eating Cannibal”:

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This is why it is time to remove the monopolies these professional groups have on essential services. The psychiatrists and psychologists have a monopoly on confining people for mental illness and, in this case, releasing the criminally mentally ill. How many times have they failed in this? James Holmes (above), the 2012 Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooter, is a good case in point. He had been banned from seeking psychiatric help because he was deemed too dangerous, but the very establishment that deemed him too dangerous to be around THEM, refused to sign papers that would let the police involuntarily confine him. At least they successfully determined he was a danger to those around him, they just refused to help the general public. We have them pushing puberty blockers and surgical sterilization on children with no evidence this will help. In fact, the actual ailments they suffer from were probably caused by the very ‘experts’ that get to decide the ‘treatment’.

Let’s look at medicine next. The medical associations regulate themselves and are calling for ideological conformity in all physicians. Anyone who disagrees about COVID masks, vaccinations, DEI, affirmative action, etc can’t be a physician. Pharmacists can refuse to fill prescriptions if they don’t agree with the physician’s treatment, or diagnosis, or they think the person looks sketchy. Medicine is an essential service. We can’t have such groups dictating if we can get care or not.

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Ethics Quiz: Is This An Ethical Teacher Training Film? Just Kidding: Of Course It Isn’t…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Imagine a culture that could permit something this biased, divisive, reductive and vile to get funded, green-lighted, produced and used.

Never mind: you don’t need to imagine it. That culture’s here.

Now what?

It Seems A Bit Late, But Perhaps It’s Time To Define “Higher Learning”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Colleges justify their outrageously inflated tuition and the absurd national tradition that their increasingly meaningless degrees are essential credentials for career success by promoting themselves as fonts of “higher learning.”

Hmmmm. Last week, “Queering Menstruation” was offered at Colgate University as part of the programming offered by the Center for Women’s Studies Brown Bag Series. “Menstruation can be exceptionally difficult for nonbinary and trans-masculine individuals because it’s a biological process that is often times associated with womanhood,” the website for the program stated. “…Queering menstruation an hopefully aid the building of more positive relationships between periods and trans and/or nonbinary people.”

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And Speaking Of Not Being Able To Trust Public Schools …KABOOM!!!!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

In Fairfield, Maine, Eric Sack father discovered a plastic baggie containing doses of prescription anti-depressants in the possession of his daughter. His daughter told him that the pills had been provided to her by the Bulldog Health Center, a School Based Health Center (SBHC) at Lawrence High School, where she is a student.

Yeah, right. I thought she was lying too, but the daughter wasn’t wasn’t. The federally funded health clinic that operates within the school gave the pills to her without his knowledge or consent.

How could this happen?

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Comment Of The Day: “How Can It Be Responsible To Trust America’s Teachers When Their Leader Posts This…?”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Curmie is one of the teachers Ethics Alarms is fortunate to have ready with commentary. I suppose my post was in his wheelhouse, in more ways than one. His multi-faceted Comment of the Day in response to “How Can It Be Responsible To Trust America’s Teachers When Their Leader Posts This…?” has already sparked some good back and forth, but I don’t want anyone to miss it, so here it is:

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There is a series of ethical questions here, going back decades.

We can start with the publication of the book to begin with. This was a diary, after all, something never intended to be made public. Is it ethical to take the explicitly confidential words and thoughts of someone else and broadcast them to the world? Yes, there’s an upside, even an enormous one, but there’s also a betrayal of trust. And does Anne’s death make it more appropriate to publish, or does it mean simply that she’s not able to exercise literally any control over her own thoughts and words?

And if you’re going to publish the diary, is it legitimate to censor parts of it rather than release the work in its entirety? It would be interesting to understand the rationale for that decision: salability? discretion? embarrassment? prudery?

We now move forward to the graphic version. It’s perfectly reasonable that it contains a translation of the entirety of the original text. I’ve never been a fan of “graphic” versions of anything, although I did enjoy some of the Classics Illustrated comic books when I was a kid. But different strokes for different folks. Assuming everything is/was above-board in terms of copyright, I see no objection to the publication.

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Saturday Morning Wake-Up (2): A Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck Update

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

1. I’ll introduce this by noting that an American Research Group poll found that public approval of President Biden’s handling of his job has fallen to just 39%.

Of the 39% of Americans saying they approve of the way Biden is handling his job, 65% say they expect the national economy will be better a year from now. (They are whistling past the graveyard.) Of the 56% saying they disapprove of the way Biden his handling his job as president, 71% believe the national economy will be worse a year from now. Why wouldn’t it be?

Of Republicans polled, just 3% approve of the way Biden is handling his job. 34% of Independents approve, but 80% of Democrats actually told another human being that they approve like the way Biden is running his Presidency because every thing is going so well. That’s incompetent citizenship. One can still be a Democrats and be able to honestly assess a disaster when a Democrat is at the helm of the Ship of State, can’t you? Talk about cult-like behavior.

2. Here’s a more encouraging poll, sort of: the latest Rasmussen Reports survey found that nearly three-quarters ,72%, of voters believe that “America is becoming a police state” under Biden. Rasmussen defined “police state” as “a tyrannical government that engages in mass surveillance, censorship, ideological indoctrination, and targeting of political opponents.” Targeting of political opponents? Why would anyone think that?

(Yes, I’m going to work that reference to Biden’s ‘anyone who opposes my party and government is a fascist and danger to democracy’ speech every chance I get. Lest we forget.…)

Republicans led the way with 76% expressing fears of totalitarian trends under Biden, but Democrats were not far behind at 67%. Combining the two polls, one can only conclude that a large number of Democrats like the fact that Biden is overseeing a developing police state. And I think that’s a correct impression.

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How Can It Be Responsible To Trust America’s Teachers When Their Leader Posts This…?

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

It is ironic that serial Ethics Villain and NEA president Randi Weingarten writes that her tweet “speaks for itself” when it is indeed a wonderful example of res ipsa loquitur, but not in the way Weingarten would have us believe.

The teacher was not fired for reading the “Diary of Anne Frank” to her class, but for using “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” without proper authorization from the school and using it to launch a class discussion of sexual molestation. The graphic version, in the style of a comic book…

…is true to Frank’s original diary but contains the sexual and other content that was taken out of the original version published by Frank’s father. The graphic novel-syle version has been critically praised, but the previously redacted material it includes are of a nature that require sensitive instruction and certainly prior approval by parents.

Weingarten misidentified the book involved due to carelessness, devotion to her political agenda, or deliberate deception, none of which are qualities any responsible parent wants in their child’s teachers. Yet Weingarten is the teacher the teachers’ union chose to represent and lead it.

Her tweet speaks for itself indeed.