Education

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Ethics Villain Dr. Anthony Fauci

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Well, I don’t think it’s forever irreparably damaged anyone.”

—Dr. Anthony Fauci, architect of the disastrous Wuhan virus response, to Fox News’ Neil Cavuto’s question, “In retrospect doctor, do you regret that it went too far? … Particularly for kids who couldn’t go to school except remotely, that it’s forever damaged them.”

How Clintonian of the good doctor, picking up on Cavuto’s awkward “forever” and adding “irreparably” to make it seem especially extreme. Maybe the lockdown forever damaged people, but it didn’t forever irreparably damage people. The lockdown caused more than 200,000 small busineses to shut down during 2020 alone. Gee, is that “forever enough”? It murdered the economy, the arts, and sports; it was significantly responsible for the George Floyd riots. The education and social development of young children were indeed retarded permanently by the isolating experience of remote schooling, as increasing numbers of assessments indicate. The corruption of US elections in 2020 arising out of the lockdown did long-term damage to the public trust in elections; whether it is “forever permanent” is yet to be seen.

It wrecked our small business, our savings, and our development permanently.

What an asshole.

An Abject Grovel That Explains So Much

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Ethics Alarms has frequently discussed the ethical and professional deterioration of the historian profession, as it, like so many other professions and institutions, has given up integrity for ideology and political agendas. History itself is under attack as a result, with historical censorship and airbrushing increasingly being favored over objective and balanced examination that does not distort past figures and events by the viewing them through the lens of “presentism.”

In an essay on the website of the American Historical Association, the organization’s president, James Sweet, offered constructive criticism of the trend, writing in part,

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Ten Ethics Observations On This Head-Exploding Interview

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The president and vice president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers gave us the gift of this KABOOM!-worthy interview in which they respond to a pandering interviewer on Good Morning America about the “controversial” provision in the new teachers’ contract that is racially discriminatory. Ethics Alarms wrote about it here,earlier this week. The provision isn’t controversial: there is no legitimate controversy. The contract requires that white teachers be laid off before “teachers of color” regardless of seniority or any other factor. That’s illegal. It violates the Civil Rights laws and the Constitution. No question, no argument. Can’t do it. No controversy about that at all.

The two union officials’ smug, intellectually dishonest and evasive comments in the interview, if nothing else, demonstrate that neither is qualified to teach any students anything. Since they are the leaders of the Minneapolis teachers, and they are, the interview demonstrates in great measure why public education is failing.

Watch the interview, if you can stand it, and consider:

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Case Study In Minneapolis: The Compensatory Racial Discrimination Slippery Slope

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Or perhaps they just don’t believe in the Constitution in Minneapolis—you know, like in California. The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers struck a deal last March 25 with the Minneapolis Public Schools ending a teacher strike, and among the provisions was “educators of color protections.” If a non-white teacher is first on the list to be let go for budget reasons, the school system must fire a white teacher with the “next least” seniority instead.

Got that?

The agreement reads in part,

“Starting with the Spring 2023 Budget Tie-Out Cycle, if excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the District shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population.”

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Compelled Ideological Conformity In Higher Education: Part I, The Students

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This is frightening, infuriating, and, of course, unethical. Sharing responsibility, however, are the supposed devotees of intellectual freedom, freedom of thought and freedom of speech who have been asleep at the switch while dedicated anti-democratic, anti-American values revolutionaries seized control over nearly all U.S. colleges and universities. Not only has the essential resistance to this siege been weak, late and under-publicized, the public’s awareness of the phenomenon is shockingly dim.

Good job, everyone.

A recent and blatant example of restrictions on ideas and beliefs comes to us from California (naturally), where the campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom had sued Clovis Community College after the administration ordered the removal of flyers that had previously been approved.

In November 2021, three Clovis students received permission from administrators to post anti-Communist flyers on bulletin boards inside Clovis’ academic buildings. The flyers were later removed when the school reversed its position in response to student objections. A month later, the college denied the YAF’s’s request to post anti-abortion flyers on bulletin boards in the academic buildings. Instead, the flyers were only allowed at an outdoor “free-speech kiosk” on the Clovis campus. The censored students are being represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the nonprofit that has taken over the national role of non-partisan champion of free speech now that the ACLU has sided with the rising totalitarians in our institutions and government.

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It’s “Be Kind To (Cute) Rapist Teachers Week” In Texas

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

That’s former Houston-area middle school teacher Marka Bodine above. Isn’t she pretty? Much too pretty to have to be in an icky old jail. So despite the fact that she was convicted of grooming, harassing, raping and continuously sexually abusing a 13-year-old student until he was 16 years old and finally alerted authorities, Bodine was only sentenced to to 60 days in jail with 10 years of probation. Shades of the infamous 2005 case of Debra Lafave, another sick but comely teacher who raped one of her 14-year-old students! Her lawyer successfully convinced the judge that their client was “too pretty for prison,” and honestly, who can argue with that? Here’s Debra:

As you can see, Marka isn’t quite the hottie that Debra was, so it’s only fair that she got some jail time. But wait! There’s more! Because Marka had given birth shortly before her sentencing (the baby was not her rape victim’s—Whew!— that would be the saga of teacher rapist Mary Kay LeTourneau), Harris County Judge Greg Glass postponed her imprisonment for a full year. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Ethics Villain William Treanor, Georgetown Law Center Dean

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I hate to pick on Georgetown’s Dean: I knew three of his predecessors well, was good friends with two of them, and I took a class from a fourth. However, Treanor, the current dean, has been substantially responsible for my estrangement from my legal alma mater (and where I worked for seven years, creating the school’s capital fund and launching its alumni magazine, among other adventures), my boycott of my class reunions, and the current position of my framed diploma, once proudly displayed, now on the floor, front to the wall.

The section from his Dean’s column in the current issue of that aforementioned magazine (GULC eventually dumped the title the original version carried, “Res Ipsa Loquitur”) signals that an unethical course is being plotted by Treanor. A creature of Yale Law School, traditionally the most political and ideologically biased of major U.S. law schools (Treanor transferred there from Harvard Law because Harvard wasn’t liberal enough), the Dean’s column attains pure demagoguery in that passage, the guts of the text.

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Most Incompetent White House Press Secretary Ever!

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

There is no longer any doubt; indeed, this conclusion seemed unavoidable almost from the beginning of Karine Jean-Pierre’s tenure as President Biden’s paid liar. It was clear immediately that she, like so many other Biden Administration hires, was chosen to check off tribal boxes—female (check); black (check); lesbian (check)—and actual skill and qualifications were afterthoughts, if considered as factors at all. However, the bar for this position is lying-on-the-ground low; there was always a substantial chance that Jean-Pierre might prove barely capable at her job by pure luck, or charm, or something.

Nope. She’s the champ, and I can’t see any future White House spokesperson being worse unless one just froze in front of the cameras and twitched. What clinched it? This statement Jean-Pierre made yesterday:

“There has been an urgency from this President from day one, when the Supreme Court made this extreme decision to take away a constitutional right, it was an unconstitutional action by them.”

Wow. Even allowing for political hyperbole, stating that a Supreme Court ruling is unconstitutional is moronic, making every listener inclined to trust the President and his spokesperson instantly dumber. Continue reading →

It is Apparently “Bizarro World Race Ethics Day” On Ethics Alarms: The BIPOC Only Debate Tournament

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

There goes my head. I find this story incredible. Northeastern and Boston College co-hosted a debate tournament last Fall restricted to students who “do not identify as white.”

Here is the announcement, tracked down by Campus Reform (hence the logo in the background):

Analysis: What the hell?

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Last-Ditch Ethics Catch-Up, 8/1/2022: Strange Questions And Answers

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This was a strange day that kept me out of the office and Ethics Alarms from morn til dusk. Sorry: couldn’t be helped. It will stand in my memory as the day I was asked, in an official appearance as an ethicist in a bar deliberation over the fitness of a young man to be allowed into the august profession of “lawyer,” this question: “Do you believe character should be taught in law school?”

It might be the most bizarre question I have been asked by anyone over the age of 9 in my life. “Character” isn’t a subject or even a definable feature. If someone hasn’t developed character by the age of 21, I cannot imagine how a law school would teach it.

1. Quickly approaching “Julie Principle” territory is The Nation’s Elie Mystal, who has a long dossier at Ethics Alarms from the days before his mind snapped like a dry twig in the wind, leaving him a perpetually furious, racist, hatemongering fool. Yet that’s good enough for MSNBC, which would feature a drooling lunatic in a straitjacket if he or she spouted sufficiently venomous insults about Republicans (and Donald Trump, of course).

Here’s what poor, mad Elie said on MSNBC today:

“It’s going to be a close election in Georgia because Walker has the backing of the Republicans. You ask why are Republicans backing this man who’s so clearly unintelligent, who so clearly doesn’t have independent thoughts, but that’s actually the reason. Walker is going do what he’s told, and that is what Republicans like. That’s what Republicans want from their Negroes: to do what they were told. And Walker presents exactly as a person who lacks independent thoughts, lacks an independent agenda, lacks an independent ability to grasp policies, and he’s just going to go in there and vote like Mitch McConnell tells them to vote.”

I am definitely not a Walker fan, but the denigrating “Negro” slur should have been flagged and reprimanded by the MSNBC host, except that it was Tiffany Cross, who is almost a female version of Elie. Moreover, it is hilarious for a Democrat to mock any Republican for “doing what he is told,” when the current Democrats in the House and Senate have voted in lockstep with their leaders’ demands almost without exception.

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