When we last left furiously virtue-signaling Georgetown University Law Center it had fired veteran adjunct professor Sandra Sellers last week for discussing frankly but inadvertently over Zoom a situation that everyone connected with the Law Center knows to be real. GULC had also suspended her co-instructor David Batson for barely nodding his head during Sellers’ statement of frustration that black students too often end up at the bottom of her grading curve. Dean Treanor, in his statement declaring the intended private discussion as “reprehensible,” darkly insinuated that Batson had failed a “bystander responsibility.”
Now Batson has also resigned, in a letter sent to the Washington Post, saying,
Today in ethics history, on March 15, 1964, President Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to urge the passage of a voting rights bill. Johnson declared that “every American citizen must have an equal right to vote, a right supposedly guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War but foiled by many states that erected barriers based on race such as literacy and character tests and outright intimidation. “Their cause must be our cause too,”Johnson said, referring to Africa-Americans. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
It is a propitious time to consider LBJ, because a newly published book has revealed that his wife Lady Bird had to talk him out of quitting not long after his voting rights bill had become reality.
Johnson dictated his ideas for a withdrawal statement to his friend, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas while in the depths of depression. “I want to go to the ranch. I don’t want even Hubert to be able to call me,” he told his wife, Lady Bird Johnson. “They may demand that I resign. They may even want to impeach me.” The First Lady ultimately talked her husband him through that period, allowing him to complete the final three years of his term. She wrote about the episode in her diary, she ordered the entry kept secret for years after her death.
I was not aware that Johnson was prone to clinical depression. Now I’m curious about how many of our other Presidents were. I was aware of three before Johnson—Pierce, Lincoln and Teddy. I’m sure there are more. Leaders, however, must not reveal their doubts and failures of confidence.
1. I believe this is called “putting the cart before the horse...” From the Boston Globe:
US officials have arrested and charged two men with assaulting US Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick with bear spray during the Jan. 6 attack, but they do not know yet whether it caused the officer’s death.
Ah, how they want to be able to say that the rioters in the “armed insurrection” in which nobody had a gun (and that wasn’t an insurrection) killed Brian Sicknick. This mission has taken on extra urgency since the mainstream news media keeps saying, even now, that Sicknick was “killed” in the riot or by rioters. Yet as the Globe admits, as of today, this claim remains a lie, or if you prefer, fake news.
My experience is that reminding Facebook friends of this fact drives them bonkers.
In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Raffaela Spone anonymously sent the coaches of her high school student daughter’s cheerleading squad “deepfake’ photos and videos that depicted the girl’s competitors nude, drinking, or smoking to get them kicked off the team. She also sent the manipulated images to the girls, and urged them to kill themselves, Bucks County District Attorney Matt Weintraub’s office said.
Nice! Of course, the woman is insane. Still, there have been far too many episodes like this. One is too many.
On a utilitarian scale, cheerleading is so deep in negative territory that it couldn’t see the positive side with super-vision. It is, of course, the epitome of presenting girls and women as sex objects while pretending that it is something else. The alleged function, “leading cheers,” is gratuitous and annoying, like those “Cheer!” commands on baseball park electronic scoreboards, or “Charge!” trumpet riff. Home crowds know when to cheer; I’ll cheer when I feel like it, thanks: BACK OFF!
But everyone knows that’s not why cheerleading squads exist. In pro sports, they are blatant eye-candy for middle-aged male fans and sexual prey for the players. Otherwise, why not have male cheerleaders? (Yes, yes, I know some schools have them). As an earlier post here pointed out,
Gee, we seem to be having a lot of race-bullying and race-based indoctrination stories here of late. Well, don’t blame me. Blame those perpetrating it for the advancement of their political and cultural power, and the cowards and weenies who are making it easy.
Today we have an episode from Democracy Prep, a public charter school in Las Vegas, Nevada. William Clarke attends the school. He lives with his mother, Gabrielle (above), who is biracial. She works at a local fast food restaurant. All Democracy Prep seniors are required to take what is clearly a Critical Race Theory and intersectionality-based class called Sociology of Change. In that “re-education” class, William and all the other students, were told to openly declare their race, gender, religious, and sexual identities. The next step was to attach negative labels to those identities, after which students were instructed to “undo and unlearn” their “beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that stem from oppression.”
1. The Georgetown Law Center scandal, the scandal being that the school has fired a professor as racist for saying out loud what the institution has known for decades (that admitting black students with significantly fewer markers of law school success that the rest of the student body means that a disproportionate number of affirmative action admittees end up on the low end of the grading curves–duh...) has been covered by none of the law profs I usually look to for their timely opinions on such matters. Even Prof. Turley, whose blog has been relentless in defending free speech on campus, has been silent. Ann Althouse, so far at least, has preferred to write about such throbbingly important topics as Eddie Izzard’s preferred pronouns. TaxProf Blog, by Pepperdine Law School Dean Paul Caron, and Prof. Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection have also, so far at least, not weighed in on the firing of adjunct Sandra Sellers and the suspension of adjunct David Batson.
What’s going on here? Please, please tell me they are not afraid of this topic. I am especially surprised at Althouse, who is retired, and has little to fear professionally.
2. At the University of South Alabama,three professors were suspended after a six-year-old photos “resurfaced” showing them in “racially insensitive” Halloween costumes. Then-Mitchell College of Business dean Bob Wood was dressed as a Confederate general, professors Alex Sharland and Teresa Weldy were seen posing with a noose and a whip…
As they bounced around social media, the pictures prompted expressions of great harm. “That makes me feel like since other cultures are starting to come here, that they don’t want us here or we’re unwanted because they want it to stay a PWI or a predominately Caucasian institution,” said student Samantha Longmire. “We have Black students on campus, how do you think that makes them feel? Do you care about your students,” said student Chante Moore.
Seriously? Seriously? A Halloween costume as a Confederate soldier is a threat, but a vampire costume is fine? These rules don’t make any sense at all, and those rules weren’t even outlined vaguely in 2014. Shaland is dressed like an English judge—how does that have racial implications? He’s a hanging judge, presumably. What does the whip mean? I have no idea—it looks like a cat-o-ninetails to me. They used that on ships, not plantations. There’s one in “H.M.S. Pinafore”! Weldy doesn’t even seem to be in costume. Wood and Sharland, both tenured, apologized. They are cowards, and are enabling the erosion of our rights while supporting the rising totalitarian effort to control thought and expression. Weldy, who is not tenured, has refused to apologize.
The adjunct professor discussed in the previous post has indeed been fired, and the white, male professor who nodded once on the Zoom recording has been placed on leave. From the Georgetown Law Center (my alma mater and former employer) administration:
This Georgetown Law Center adjunct professor is going to be fired, shunned, cancelled and otherwise ruined professionally and personally, and she has no excuses whatsoever.
The Ethics Alarms “Naked Teacher Principle” holds 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.” This does not mean that such a teacher necessarily should be dismissed, but that the teacher has no basis for claiming to be a victim. The conduct was foolish and irresponsible, and the repercussions predictable.
The newly minted “Technologically Inept Adjunct Professor With Politically Incorrect Opinions Principle” is based on similar calculations. As certain anti-woke statements and positions are getting people fired or canceled daily, with any diversion from the current racial spoils and “diversity” narrative being tarred as “racist,” for a professor at a law school, especially one as tainted by Leftist bias as Georgetown, to express such views over any form of electronic communications is almost grounds for involuntary commitment. Careless and reckless people shouldn’t teach law students. It doesn’t matter whether the statement involved expressed a valid and defensible observation: if it involves a tenet of woke cant and isn’t supportive, then the statement is an invitation to be cancelled. First Amendment? Doesn’t matter. Academic freedom? Irrelevant. Fairness? The Golden Rule? “There but for the grace of God…”? Risible.The third rail is known and recognizable, and you deliberately jumped on it assuming it wasn’t live?
In Little Rock, Arkansas, Ashley Murry’s 5-year-old son told her that after a toilet clogged following his use of it, his teacher ordered him stick his hand in the toilet and remove his feces and the dirty tissue. Murry’s son is a kindergartener at Crystal Hill Elementary School. The mother reacted to his report by filing a complaint with the school, pulling him out of the class, and posting the story on social media.
The Pulaski County Special School District began “an investigation” while the teacher was put on administrative leave. The teacher attempted to patch things up by calling Murry and saying that she knew she was wrong. She also explained to the principal that she was only trying to teach the child not to use too much toilet paper so that the school toilets wouldn’t get stopped up.
See? Her intentions were good! Nonetheless, the child’s mother says the teacher needs to be fired, because “you don’t treat kids like this.”
Come for the ethics, stay for the chivalry lesson!
Steve-O-From NJ ( as I strongly suspected he would) responded to the infuriating tale of the high school teacher who ordered her students to act out her infantile and politically-warped view of “chivalry” with a brief lesson on what Medieval chivalry was really about. Obviously an Ethics Alarms post can’t cover this entire, rich topic, but students reading here would come away with a lot more genuine historical perspective than the young victims of a feminist teacher’s ignorance at Texas’s Shallowater High School. This Comment of the Day is admittedly tangential to the ethics issue, which is that our public school teachers frequently don’t know what they are blathering about, and are too often more concerned with woke indoctrination than they are in education.
It also points up a dilemma. Teachers should be capable of conveying the essentials of “the three ‘Rs,'” and perhaps age-appropriate science and geography. But history? Most teachers were educated in a school system that neglected or distorted history, and their own knowledge and analytical abilities in this subject are, to be kind, inadequate. Thus they pass along their own biases, misunderstandings and flawed knowledge to the next generation. I would conclude that teachers should be required to stick to the approved history textbooks and their lesson plans, except that most of those have been polluted by ideological agendas too.
Well, that’s a topic for another day. Right now, the topic is Chivalry.
At Texas’s Shallowater High School, a “chivalry” assignment given to female students required girls to “dress in a feminine manner,” lower their heads and curtsy to please men, “walk behind men daintily as if their feet were bound,” and “not complain or whine.” The boys were told to dress in jackets and ties, pick up any object dropped by “the ladies” and to hold doors open, among other things.
The alleged purpose of the assignment was to “demonstrate to the school how the code of chivalry and standards set in the medieval concept of courtly love carries over into the modern day.” An assignment sheet included a set of “rules” with a line for an “adult witness signature” next to each:
