Education

Ethics Quiz: The Teacher’s Confession

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

An unnamed teacher at Bohls Middle School in Pflugerville, Texas, did some candid soul-searching about the nature of bias in front of his class. The discussion was recorded above. It’s fair to say that it did not go over well.

The topic was bias in general, and racial bias in particular. “Deep down in my heart, I’m ethnocentric,” the teacher said, “which means I think my race is the superior one…I think everybody thinks that.They’re just not honest about it.” Later he stated that “everybody is a racist at that level.”

The reaction was as you would predict, though why the teacher didn’t predict it is an interesting mystery on its own. Some students were disturbed, many told their parents about the discussion (or how they perceived it), parents complained, and the school administrators freaked out, as they are wont to do.

First Pflugerville ISD Superintendent Dr. Douglas Killian released a statement regarding the incident the same day, stating that the teacher had been summarily executed.

Just kidding! He had been placed on leave, he said:

“We are aware of an inappropriate conversation a teacher at Bohls Middle School had with students this week during an advisory class. This interaction does not align with our core beliefs as a district. The video of the conversation includes statements that we find wholly inappropriate. The teacher has been placed on administrative leave while Human Resources conducts an investigation. Pflugerville ISD and Bohls MS work together to create an inclusive and welcoming environment for our students. The advisory activity was inappropriate, inaccurate, and unacceptable. This type of interaction will not be tolerated in PfISD schools. Staff checked in with students today. Our counselors and administrators are always available if your student wants to discuss this situation further.We always do our best to ensure the safety of all students; we encourage them to be self-advocates and let an adult know when something is wrong, as they did in this situation; this could be to a parent, a teacher, or a counselor. If you see something, say something. We apologize for any undue stress or concern this has caused. As always, we appreciate the support of our families and community.”

The proverbial other shoe dropped yesterday, after a weekend of perfunctory and objective (I jest) “investigation.” The teacher had been fired, Killian announced:

“Last Friday, Nov. 11, Pflugerville ISD officials were made aware of an inappropriate conversation a teacher at Bohls Middle School had with students during an advisory class. As of Monday morning, Nov. 14, the teacher in question is no longer employed by Pflugerville ISD and we are actively looking for a replacement.

“In addition to providing this video to our administrators, the video was shared to social media by some in the class and has prompted local and national media attention. We apologize to any parents whose students have been included in the video without their knowledge.

“We want to reiterate that this conversation does not align with our core beliefs and is not a reflection of our district or our culture at Bohls Middle School. Pflugerville ISD and Bohls MS staff work together to create an inclusive and welcoming environment for all of our students. The advisory discussion was inappropriate, inaccurate, and unacceptable; and this type of interaction will not be tolerated in any PfISD schools.

“We apologize to our students and families at Bohls Middle School for the undue stress or concern this has caused. We have counselors and administrators available for any of our students and families who want to discuss this situation further.

“We always do our best to ensure the safety of all students; we encourage them to be self-advocates and let an adult know when something is wrong, as they did in this situation. If you see something, say something.

“As always, we appreciate the support of our Bohls Middle School families and entire PfISD community.”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Should the teacher have been fired?

I’m going to restrain myself for once: I could write several long posts about aspects of this incident. I think I’ll just jot down a few points, and leave the rest to you:

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I May Be Overly Judgmental, But I Think A School Board Member Should Know What Racism Is….

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

White school board member Mike Martin read an article toward the end of a three-hour meeting of the Wilson School Board in Pennsylvania that claimed, among other things, that blacks are easily offended and adverse to “correction” when asked to pull up their pants or turn down their music.

“I think sometimes we’re afraid to discipline a group because of the recourse or their position or it might offend them, and I think that brings problems that I know that we’ve been talking about, you know, rowdiness in classrooms and discipline in classrooms because we’re afraid to take that next step,” Wilson said after reading the article, which was apparently written by a black author.

It did not go over well. When informed that the attitudes displayed in the article were racist, Martin professed shock and innocence. He told reporters after the meeting blew up,

I really did not think I was being racist. I apologize for how it came across. As horrible as it sounds, it wasn’t meant to be a horrible statement and I need to fix it….I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feeling, if it came across that way I have to apologize. I have to step to the plate. I’m really sorry that this thing blossomed into what it manifested into…Most people that really know me know that I don’t have a racist bone in my body…I know some people think I’m a closet racist and I have to live with that.

Someone explain to this guy that when one publicly and approvingly reads a document that attributes negative attitudes and offensive conduct to an entire race, that’s racism by definition.

Then someone explain to him that idiots shouldn’t serve on school boards.

Ethics Quiz: When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring And You’re A Drunk College Senior

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Sophia Rosing, 22, a University of Kentucky student, was drunk. Really drunk; drunl as a skunk, as the saying goes. As she tumbled into a campus dorm lobby, the student at the front desk, Kylah Spring, tried to stop her, because Rosing had not presented her ID. The besotted senior launched into tirade against Spring, physically attacking the young black woman while calling her a “bitch” and a “nigger,” the latter over 200 times.

When campus security arrived, Rosing kicked and bit the officers as they tried to place her under arrest. University Police were finally able to take Rosing into custody just before 4am. She was charged with public intoxication, assault and disorderly conduct.

The incident was, of course, videoed and posted on social media. Rosing is out on bail, but she will certainly face criminal penalties.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is….

Beyond the criminal penalties, what are fair, just and ethical consequences for Sophia Rosing now?

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New Progressive Standard: Apparently It Is Now Acceptable To Describe Black Republicans Using Racial Epithets

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

At least, it’s okay if the speaker is black and a good Democrat.

Good to know, don’t you think?

Professor Sundiata Cha-Jua, a history and African-American studies professor at the University of Illinois Urban-Champaign, referred to Republican Georgia U.S. Senate candidate as “incompetent, subliterate and coonish” in a column for The News-Gazette.

Coonish! “Coon,” dictionaries tell us, is “a contemptuous term used to refer to a Black person.” It is no better than “nigger,” it’s just avoided the publicity. Calling a black individual a “coon” is as racially denigrating as one can get; it meets the legal definition of “fighting words.” Yet the professor has not received any backlash from students at his university, nor faculty, nor administration. A white professor who made similar statements about, say, Barack Obama, would have to join witness protection.

In the same column, this esteemed prof, who teaches “antiracism,” compared a black Republican named Terence Stuber to a slave because he is running to be Champaign County Clerk against a black Democrat.

“What type of Black Republican is Stuber?,” Cha Jua wrote. “He was recruited by White Republican leadership to run against Ammons, the only African American clerk in Champaign County history… Stuber reiterates “massa” Trump’s talking points. Intimating fraud, he cast aspersions on the 2020 elections….His words and deeds indicate he’s a genuine MAGA Black White supremacist.”

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Mark Your Calendars: The Next Anti-Supreme Court Freak-Out Is Scheduled For June

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

In 1978’s Bakke decision, a fractured majority of the Supreme Court found that universities could consider race to build a diverse student body, agreeing that educational benefits could flow from diversity. At the same time, the opinion prohibited quotas, requiring universities to undertake a “holistic” review of each applicant in which race could be a factor. The Supreme Court affirmed this foggy principle in 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger and again in 2016’s Fisher v. Texas. Schools, meanwhile, became adept at making sure that holistic approach resulted in the desired racial proportions.

Now the Supreme Court appears ready to rule that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unlawful. Five hours of arguments and questioning in the two cases’ oral presentations before the justices made that abundantly clear, but it was already clear long before. The cases’ decisions won’t be handed down until June 2023 (unless that majority opinion gets leaked too), but the Left is already laying the groundwork for a Dobbs-like freak-out.

The clear media talking point memo apparently requires all stories to call such a decision ” a move that would overrule decades of precedents.” But this is deliberately disingenuous. From the beginning, the Supreme Court allowed colleges and diversities to use race in their admission procedures while acknowledging that it was a special exception to the equal protection requirement of the 14th Amendment that was necessitated by the unusual circumstances of slavery and Jim Crow. (It was, in fact, a perfect example of the Ethics Incompleteness Principle, where a valid rule did not work well in a unique situation, and thus s special, unique solution had to be crafted that does NOT serve as a precedent.) Justice Sandra Day O’Connor admitted as much in her opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), concluding that affirmative action in college admissions is justifiable, but not forever: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in student body diversity] approved today.”

It was a bad and confusing opinion: if the law and the Constitution is the same, why would it be acceptable to violate it then but not 25 years later? It is now 19 years later; 25 years was not a scientific estimate, but just wait: one of the arguments that will be aimed at the SCOTUS opinion in June will be that it’s “too soon.”

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Ethics Alarm! The Public School Political Indoctrination In Fairfax, Virginia Rates Two “Geenas”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I know Geena has already appeared here recently, but Americans really should be afraid of this story out of Fairfax, Virginia, and be especially afraid as they consider how long such sinister brain-washing of our young has been going on. The incident has a lot more relevance to the elections next week than an isolated attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, which has none. If we had a responsible journalistic establishment in the country any more, there would be an uproar over such strategies aimed at public school students. As it is, only Fox News has bothered to cover the story at all, and not very well at that.

Fifth graders were assigned the task of critiquing an anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment, anti-NRA essay as part of a persuasive writing fifth-grade unit from the teachers’ aide, “Units of Study in Opinion, Information, and Narrative Writing.” The screed is a fake child’s essay, obviously written by an adult. The clear purpose of the exercise is not to develop critical thinking skills but rather to embed anti-gun beliefs in children too young to evaluate and resist them. Here is the essay:

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Paging The ACLU! But Will They Answer?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Another integrity test for the biased and rotting American Civil Liberties Union. According to their long-standing mission, coming to the defense of two students being prosecuted for saying bad word would be automatic. So far, though, not a peep. Will the ACLU stand up for the Bill of Rights when the breach is so clear?

I’m not holding my breath.

In Houma, Louisiana, Two high school students have been arrested and accused of hate crimes after video circulated on social media of them using the term “nigger” on the high school grounds. Their words were not directed at any individual, yet they face charges of inciting a riot, hate crimes, and cyberbullying.

You can’t do this, you know. The government can’t punish anyone criminally for mere words, and it doesn’t matter what they are. OK, you have my obligatory agreement that “nigger” is a haeful epithet (when used as an epithet) and it’s use cannot be condoned and shouldn’t be encouraged or ignored, yadayada, but if that’s the reason almost nobody is pointing out the more essential truth that the Constitution protects us from sanctions by the government for ugly, mean, hateful or controversial speech, a lttle emedial instruction on core civil liberties is greatly neededd.

Yoooo Hooo! ACLU-hooo! Where the hell are you-hoo?

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Autumn Afternoon Ethics Leaves, 10/25/2022: Hope, Harvard, Fakes, And Weenies.

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

So far, at least, Biden’s spectacularly incompetent and unethical Cabinet hasn’t seen anyone indicted, though there are good arguments that at least two of them should be impeached. This date in history, October 25, marks the day in 1929 when Albert B. Fall, Secretary of the Interior in President Warren G. Harding’s cabinet, was found guilty of accepting a bribe while in office. Fall was the first Presidential cabinet member to be so humiliated. There would be others.

Fall accepted a $100,000 interest-free “loan” from Edward Doheny of the Pan-American Petroleum and Transport Company in exchange for Interior granting him a valuable oil lease in the Elk Hills naval oil reserve, which together with the Teapot Dome naval oil reserve in Wyoming, had been transferred to the Department of the Interior as part of Fall’s scheme to profit by receiving bribes. The Senate Public Lands Committee launched an investigation that revealed not only the $100,000 bribe that Fall received from Doheny, but also a $300,000 bribe that Harry Sinclair, president of Mammoth Oil, had given to Fall for use of the Teapot Dome reserve in Wyoming.

Yet Fall was only sentenced to a year in prison. It’s comforting to know that laws were only for the “little people” 100 years ago too, don’t you think?

A Cabinet member who betrays the public trust like that belongs in prison for decades, if not life.

1. There is hope! At least one committed progressive activist of note has the integrity to be revolted at what her party of choice is doing. Susan Sarandon, a charter member of the Hollywood Left, posted this on Twitter:

Good for her.

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Déjà Vu Ethics: The Washington Post Is Stunned To Find That The Public’s Attitude Toward Affirmative Action Hasn’t Changed In 50 Years.

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I’m not, nor should anyone else be surprised.

Writes the Post:

More than 6 in 10 Americans support a ban on the consideration of race in college admissions, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll, but an equally robust majority endorses programs to boost racial diversity on campuses….On Oct. 31, the justices will hear arguments in cases challenging race-conscious admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.If the court’s conservative majority reverses decades of precedent and prohibits the consideration of race and ethnicity, the Post-Schar School poll conducted this month finds 63 percent of adults would support the change. At the same time, 64 percent say programs designed to increase racial diversity of students are a good thing. Support for boosting diversity is high across racial and ethnic groups, while Black Americans are less supportive of banning race as a factor in admissions than people of other backgrounds.

Does this even qualify as news at this point? Back at the very start of the affirmative action movement in colleges and universities, polling always showed that the public objected to “racial quotas,” meaning that race and color would be a decisive factor in admitting college applicants, but if quotas were vaguely framed as “affirmative action,” meaning “let’s do something to avoid perpetuating a permanent underclass in American society by increasing the proportion of minority college graduates,” then the public was substantially favorable. Has any public policy question ever been more vulnerable to polling manipulation by choice of words?

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Ethics Quiz: The Cartoon Quote

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

I would, left to my own instincts, categorize this as a “When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring” episode. But Legal Insurrection, a conservative commentary blog that I find to be usually reasonable, feels otherwise, so I’ll frame this as an ethics quiz.

Robert Ternansky, a lecturer at UC-San Diego, was interrupted by loud speaking  from the hallway outside his classroom. Ternansky walked into the hallway and seeing students he took to be Hispanic, immediately quoted the signature catch phrases of now politically incorrect Warner Bros. cartoon character Speedy Gonzalez, “The Fastest Mouse in All of Mexico”: “Sí, sí señor! Ándale, ándale! Arriba, arriba!”The video of the class also catches Ternansky  asking his students, “How do you say ‘quiet’ in Mexican?” One replies, it seems, “Caliente,” and the lecturer says,  “Caliente, huh? Help me. All I knew how to say was ‘Ándale, ándale, arriba, arriba.’ I don’t think that was — to be quiet? That’s like hurry up? Did I insult them?”

Apparently! Students complained, and the school responded with this statement:

UC San Diego officials were recently made aware of offensive and hurtful comments that a professor made in a chemistry class when video of the comments was posted to social media. At that time, the professor was engaged about his comments, and it was made clear to him that they do not reflect our community values of inclusivity and respect. The professor has since apologized to the students and will be doing so to others involved.

As a reminder to our community, and as was shared with media outlets who inquired, UC San Diego is committed to the highest standards of civility and decency toward all. We are committed to promoting and supporting a community where all people can work and learn together in an atmosphere free of abusive or demeaning treatment.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is, in the words of Legal Insurrection writer Mike LaChance…

“Does this strike anyone as a bit of an overreaction?”

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