Education

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Criminal Defense Attorney Scott Greenfield

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“A perpetual concern, particularly in criminal defense, is that the next generation of lawyers will lack the skills needed to do their job, to zealously represent their clients. They struggle to tolerate the language we encounter in the ordinary course of our work. They are blinded by hatred of their prosecutorial adversaries, the law enforcement witnesses, the judge who denies their pleas for “justice.” Can they mount effective arguments against their clients if they can’t tolerate hearing arguments with which they disagree?”

—Criminal defense lawyer Scott Greenfield, on his blog “Simple Justice,” reacting to the law students at UC Hastings shouting down Georgetown Law professor Illya Shapiro, who was supposed to be engaging in a civil debate with a Hastings professor.

Ethics Alarms discussed the Hastings incident here [#4]; I should have probably made a solo post of it, because as Greenfield correctly points out, it has wider implications. Later he writes,

The reaction to these students was split, with many woke law students and baby lawyers applauding their action while more experienced lawyers were appalled at what they viewed as a failure of a law school, of law students, to demonstrate the minimal capacity to engage in the manner that will be expected of them as lawyers. If tactics like this are what law students deem acceptable, will they ever be capable of being lawyers?

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At Columbia, Free Speech Chilling Takes A Great Leap Forward

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The assault on free expression as well as the speech-chilling practice of seeking to publicly crush those who do not observe the social justice dictates of progressives in power advanced ominously yesterday. Unsurprisingly, the episode at issue occurred at an Ivy League University, as our educational sectors have been among the trailblazers in speech and idea suppression. Unsurprising to me at least was that it involved Twitter. Just like in the Illya Shapiro controversy at Georgetown Law Center, a scholar didn’t use quite the words he should have (to be safe, and safety is everything these days) according to the Democrats’ Little Red Book. This time, however, the hammer fell harder. Continue reading →

Good Start, Binghamton U….Now Fire Her.

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Binghamton University (NY) Professor Ana Maria Candela’s Introduction to Sociology syllabus originally stated that white students had to wait for “non-white folks” to talk before speaking up or asking questions, according to the syllabus.

In another charming section, Candela’s syllabus also included a quote from Chinese dictator Mao Zedong: “No investigation, no right to speak,” which she interprets benignly to mean, “Don’t speak until you know something.” I question the wisdom of quoting a Communist despot extolling “investigation,” but OK. Candela’s rules on class participation, however, embraced “progressive stacking,” which conditions “students’ participation and speaking based on their race and gender.” Continue reading →

President’s Day On Ethics Alarms: The Nation’s Incompetent, Disrespectful, Unethical Treatment Of George Washington’s Birthday [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

How many Americans of our rich national past have a birthday celebrated as a national holiday? One: Martin Luther King. That surely makes the anti-white racists and the “the most important aspect of the United States is its racial divisions” gang—you know, Democrats—happy, but it is also misleading and ridiculous. The most important single figure, black, brown, white or whatever it is currently acceptable to call Asians and Native Americans (I haven’t checked this morning), is George Washington. He was, as George Will likes to say, “the indispensable man”—no George, no U.S. His birthday absolutely should be a national holiday.

Yet it isn’t, due to a confluence of factors. You can’t call today “George Washington’s Birthday,” because the date is February 21, and George was born on the 22nd. In the just-launched 4th season of Amazon’s clever and brilliantly cast comedy series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” the heroine, on the road, learns that her parents are having a birthday party for her young son. “The real date wasn’t good for me,” her very weird father (Tony Shaloub) explains. “He’s five! He won’t notice.” “What kind of people change a kid’s birthday?” she protests.

Americans. And worse, we did it to the man to whom we owe the greatest debt of all.

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An Indiana School Allowed Parents To Let Parents Opt Their Kids Out Of Black History Month Lessons? GOOD!

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Two Washington Post Ethics Dunce-worthy episodes, back to back!

The Post published this headline as if it was an obvious, res ipsa loquitur, outrage:

An Indiana school planned Black History Month lessons. A letter sent to parents allowed them to opt out.

“Those crazy, racist conservatives again!” was the unstated assumption of the Post’s article. After the consent form…

….was circulated on social media, such an uproar was raised by fans of anti-America indoctrination in the public schools that the school district Superintendent Emily Tracy felt that she had to send a letter to families and staff members, acknowledging the opt-out form and promising that the school district is “gathering more information on the matter” but “In the meantime, know that we support teaching about the facts in our history including historical injustices. Our District is and will continue to be committed to having compassion for all and supporting an education community that will allow all students, staff, families and community members the opportunity to feel welcome.” Continue reading →

Ethics Hero (“Socking It To Georgetown University” Div.) #1: Student Jessica Costescu

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

No weenie she.

Costescu is a junior at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and the president of the Network of Enlightened Women chapter on campus. Her parents fled communism in Romania. She has been shocked and disturbed by the growing hostility to free speech, and indeed to freedom itself, that she has encountered at what is supposed to be an elite and distinguished institution of high learning in our nation’s capital.

As a vocal conservative, she has been threatened “so much so that [she] now fear[s] to speak freely and voice [her] conservative beliefs.” She reports that she has been cyber-bullied by other students “in such a menacing way” that she is “afraid to engage online, or even during class” with her “left-leaning peers.”

However, instead of hiding, or, as is the response sought by such tactics, conforming, Jessica wrote about her experiences on the conservative website College Fix, not anonymously but under her own name, not pathetically but in defiance. She writes in part, Continue reading →

So…Would Georgetown Law Dean Treanor Have Suspended Philosopher Stephen Kershnar?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

We’re still waiting to see if Georgetown University Law Center, my disgraceful alma mater, will fire scholar Ilya Shapiro for expressing doubts that limiting the pool of Supreme Court nominees using factors that have absolutely nothing to do with judicial competence, experience or acumen is the best way to get the optimum Court. The statements condemning Shapiro by GULC’s Dean have been indefensible, consisting of woke virtue-signaling and speech-chilling posturing. It worked: none of the law school’s faculty have had the courage or integrity to oppose him, essentially abandoning their support for academic freedom.

This caused me to wonder in the Law Center would be similarly hostile to philosopher Stephen Kershnar of the State University of New York at Fredonia if he were instead a GULC faculty member. Kershnar, you might have read, gave a recent interview about “sexual taboos” on the philosophy podcast Brain in a Vat.The politically conservative Libs of TikTok posted a video about it and social media went metaphorically berserk. Kershnar expressed doubt that adults having sex with minors is necessarily wrong, and raised some hypotheticals and examples to make his point. Grandmothers in some cultures fellate baby boys to soothe colic, for example. Kershner also opined that the harm to children and teens who engage in sex with adults has not been established, and he made a terrible Rationalization #22 (“It’s not the worst thing”) argument that children participate in a number of activities besides sex that they don’t fully “understand” and which aren’t generally considered to be harmful. He also posed thought experiments, like…

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Ethics Dunce, China Olympics Ethics Train Wreck Division: Mark Wrighton, President Of George Washington University

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I wonder how the Board of George Washington University felt as it watched its newly hired President make a complete ass of himself. This is what is technically known as “a bad sign.” His botched and ominous response to his first test also may well be signature significance for a political correctness addled boob. We shall see.

Last week, well-conceived satiric posters, appearing to promote the 2022 Olympic Winter Games in Beijing until one looks closely, began going up on dorm doors and elsewhere around the Washington, D.C. university campus. The artwork pointedly depicts Chinese athletes in “events” representing human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese government. In one poster, a biathlon competitor points her rifle at someone who is blindfolded and wearing the Uyghur flag. Another shows a snowboarder atop a surveillance camera. The posters were created by a Chinese dissident artist based in Australia.

The George Washington University Chinese Students and Scholars Association, a local chapter of a Chinese student group overseen by the Chinese Communist Party, reacted true to their corrupt culture while adopting one of the worst habits of ours. It attempted to censor the posters, calling them “seriously racist”—they learned that trick from Democrats here— and said the art “insulted China” in an email to students last week and a letter to university officials, including GW President Mark Wrighton.

“Racist” and “insulted China”—you know, like calling a pandemic virus that China unleashed on the world a Chinese virus was racist and insulted China. Indeed, The student group was most upset by the poster that shows a Chinese curler pushing a Wuhan virus instead of a curling stone. Good.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 2/5/2022 (Cont.): Part 2, Rogan, Roker, “Reacher” And “More”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

1. There is hope! The new Amazon Prime Jack Reacher series, “Reacher,” has no mixed race couples in it whatsoever. I was amazed, and wonder if this means the thing was made in 2019, before Hollywood decided that the accidental killing in Minnesota of a black perp by a brutal white cop in an incident having nothing to do with race meant that the world film and TV present to America must be one where nearly 100% of all married and unmarried relationships consist of two races. Isn’t it amazing that a casting feature that was once not only routine but accurate seems remarkable by its absence, and it was completely benign then and would still be accurate now?

2. Just for curiosity, I’m going to keep getting these Harvard alerts. The unethical though famous institution I graduated from once is marking this big reunion year with special online events for participants. The first one, not surprisingly, deals with…climate change! You would think that such a university, with all the subjects it covers and all of the departments available, could put together a schedule that didn’t consist of partisan obsessions, wouldn’t you?

But no. I fully expect subsequent programs to include, “Systemic Racism,” “Protecting the Right to Choose,” “The January 6 Insurrection” and “Mainstream Media Conservative Bias.”

I’m getting enough propaganda on climate change, thanks. Today I learned that “Once considered comic relief to anchors, television meteorologists are making it clear to viewers that they are covering a crisis in real time.” The “news story” headline begins, “As Storms Intensify…” Intensify based on what? There is no proof that storms are “intensifying” that justifies stating this as fact.

But you can’t deny that Al Roker is an “expert” on climate science though! After all, he attended the State University of New York at Oswego where he received a BA in communications in 1976….

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Is This Real? I Hope It’s A Hoax. I Fear It Is Not…[UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

So far, the story is only on Tik-Tok, and I don’t trust Tik-Tok. In a video you can see here (I can’t figure out how to embed non-YouTube videos), a group of little children at an unnamed D.C. school can be heard chanting “Black Lives Matter” while marching around holding BLM signs.

It’s a chilling scene: tiny kids wearing masks being subjected to school indoctrination. Is it a private school? Constitutionally, that makes a difference; ethically, it makes no difference at all.

Given that this is the Ditsrict, and that more than one school class in other locals were taught to sing songs extolling Barack Obama, I will not be shocked to find that this chilling scene is real.

UPDATE: Sharp-eyed reader/sleuth Edward spotted “Lowell School” in the video, so we know that this is taken at a real private school in the District. [https://www.lowellschool.org/] It still could be faked: the soundtrack could have been added.

Maybe they really were chanting “Let’s Go Brandon!”