Education

“Cornell Just Doesn’t Get That Freedom of Speech Thingy” and Other Observations On a Campus Fiasco

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Read this whole jaw-dropping NYT article (Gift link!) and see if you can find evidence of anyone ethical in the entire story. It’s kind of like “Where’s Waldo?”

1.The headline is “Cornell Cancels Kehlani Performance Over Alleged Antisemitic Statements.” The caption under the photo (above) adds, “Kehlani, a popular R&B singer, is being replaced as the headline act at Cornell University’s annual concert.”

Observation: If she’s a popular performer for her singing ability and presentation, her “alleged Anti-Semitic statements should be irrelevant. This pure cancel culture stuff. Still. How can Cornell teach anybody if its administrators learn nothing?

2. “In a 2024 music video for the song “Next 2 U,” Kehlani danced in a jacket adorned with kaffiyehs as dancers waved Palestinian flags in the background. During the video’s introduction, the phrase “Long Live the Intifada” appeared against a dark background.”

Observation: So what? The event organizers can tell her not to perform that number.

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Of Course Unethical, But What Was This Parent Thinking?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Most Ethics Alarms posts involve analysis of what I regard as ethical or unethical activity with larger lessons attached regarding society, organizations, institutions and prominent or influential individuals. Now and then I choose an incident where there is no dispute about whether the conduct was unethical, but it was just so unethical that I feel attention must be paid, if only to remind us how depraved and devoid of ethical instincts and values the people around us can be. An esteemed commenter recently complained about such a post.

My motivation for these no-doubters is usually what it is in this case: I want to know how such a thing could happen. What was the miscreant thinking? How could they ever believe that their conduct was acceptable? Where has our society and culture failed to the extent that an incident like this could ever occur?

Teresa Isabel Bernal, 33, was arrested this week for bringing jello shots to her daughter’s fifth grade Christmas party. The party was held on Dec. 20, 2024, at Jones Elementary in Tyler, Texas. Bernal told the Tyler Independent School District police officer that she didn’t know that the cups of jello contained liquor when she bought them, but the evidence indicates otherwise.

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A Letter From Harvard, A Response From Turley

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Harvard’s president Alan Garber invaded my email yesterday with a “message to the Harvard Community,” of which, alas, I am a long-time member. It arrived on the same day that the University, with its almost 55 billion dollar endowment, announced that it was suing the government for having the audacity to withhold about 2 billion dollars in federal research grants. Here is Garber’s letter—-you can skim it or jump to the end: it is easily summarized as “How dare they?” …

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CNN Issues Perhaps the Dumbest Factcheck Ever!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Wow. CNN senior justice correspondent Evan Perez appeared on last night’s episode of Wolf Blitzer’s “The Situation Room” and attempted to refute President Trump’s assessment of Harvard as a “cesspool of leftist thinking.” (Harvard is, in fact, a cesspool of leftist thinking.) Perez thought he had definitive proof that the representation was false.

“Now, what [the Trump administration] is asking for, Wolf, is for Harvard not only to comply with what they say are anti-Semitic, control of anti-Semitic issues on campus, but they want bigger changes. They want to oversee hiring and admissions standards. They want to make sure that conservative views are being represented on campus.”

Here comes Perez’s brilliant argument: wait for it….

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President Trump Is Trying To Reform Harvard? Good! [Part 2: The Aftermath]

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

(Part 1 is here)

The Administration’s demand that Harvard start acting like a non-partisan educational institution rather than a woke ideology propaganda factory was met with predictable indignation, accusations, and deflections. $2.2 billion in federal funding ticketed for Cambridge was cut after the university refused to submit to the administration’s ultimatum, as Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber rejected the letter’s demands. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,” he wrote. Apparently Harvard also can’t allow itself to meet its own standards of academic integrity and the duty of teaching students how to think rather than what to think. Garber’s response came after protesters rallied to call on Harvard to defy the Trump administration’s demands, and hundreds of faculty members signed a letter urging Harvard to “condemn President Trump’s attempt to remake higher education.”

I submit that when higher education has become a destabilizing and destructive force in society because it has been taken over by those more concerned with transforming American society than teaching and enlightening its young, it is well within Presidential power and the President’s obligation to take reasonable measures to address that problem.

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Ethics Quote of the Day: Mrs. Q

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“I think I have figured out the new virtue signal of the progressive left. A conversation in the early stages begins with, “in these dark times” or “because things are so bad right now.” What this really means is, “I hate Trump, and I am letting you know that without directly saying it.” It’s almost a test it seems. What are some graceful yet pointed responses to such behavior?”

—-Star Ethics Alarms commenter Mrs. Q, in last Friday’s Open Forum

Mrs. Q’s free-standing comment was prescient, because I had been preparing to post about New York Times’ periodic progressive opinion writer Frank Bruni’s obnoxious “What Do You Tell a College Student Graduating Into This America?” [Gift link!] in his subscriber-only newsletter. Bruni, who has carved out a niche for himself at the Times because he is fat and gay, has been flummoxed (he says) when seniors visit him in his faculty office at Duke (he teaches writing) and ask, as a recent Duke co-ed did, her eyes “red” and “watery,” “Where do you find hope?”

If he were not the most knee-jerk of knee-jerk progressives and crippled by Trump Derangement, he could have answered, “Oh, grow the hell up! You can find hope everywhere, and more here in the good ol’ U.S.A. than just about anywhere else.”

Not Bruni. The piece is a great example of how an essay that is mostly biased foolishness can be enlightening, indeed often more enlightening than opinion pieces that are spot on. For example, Bruni begins by writing, “[M]y students have the privilege of attending one of the country’s most selective and affluent universities and that simply getting a college degree, any college degree, gives them a big advantage.” Yes, it’s a big advantage that graduates from Duke and other leftist indoctrination factories do not deserve, as the weepy senior’s question demonstrates. Leaving the womb of academia for real life in a nation you have been taught has been unrelentingly racist, unjust and evil since 1690 is certain to feel hopeless.

More from Bruni…

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What’s Up, Doc? UConn Med School’s Unethical, Woke, Ridiculous “DEI Hippocratic Oath”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Unbelievable.

In August of last year, UConn School of Medicine’s class of 2028 became the first to recite a newly revised version of the Hippocratic Oath:

“I will strive to promote health equity. I will actively support policies that promote social justice and specifically work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination and racism.”

No, this is not a sick joke. No, I am not making this up. Yes, our institutions of higher education really are in the clutches of maniacs who think this kind of indoctrination is part of their job.

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Gee, I Wonder Why Americans Are Losing Trust In Their Nation’s Institutions? It’s a Mystery!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Science, Academia, Journalism, Government.

On June 3, 2022, the young protestor above tied her neck to the net during a tennis match at the French Open, with her shirt reading “We Have 1028 Days Left” sending the critical message to the world that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had decreed that if massive de-carbonization was not implemented before that (literal!) deadline, it would be too late to save the planet from a climate change apocalypse.

The 1,028th day was last week, Thursday March 27, 2025. Does that young woman feel ridiculous? She should. Now, she probably is one of those fanatics who won’t procreate because children are bad for the environment, but if she does, her kids will have a ball with that photo. I know I would have, just as if there was a photo of my mother as a teen dressed as a banana, or my father with dicks on his face after having them drawn on while he was asleep.

The Totalitarian Left in the U.S. has been citing “science” to justify irresponsible policies for years, indeed decades, and accountability is at hand. If the science of climate change is so “settled,” why are all the predictions and deadlines proven ridiculously false? Even our currently under-educated, critical thinking deprived rising generations are smart enough to figure out a con when they see, well, when they see the same con over and over again. Here’s an article about how the Great Barrier Reef that we were told was being destroyed by global warming (Science!) has more than doubled in a decade and its size and health is the highest ever recorded.

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Institutional Ethics Dunce: The University of Maryland

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It’s not precisely an example of Poe’s Law, but it is close enough to be ominous. American society and culture seems to be finally ripping the metaphorical blinders off and recognizing how thoroughly our colleges and universities have abandoned their core mission of education, or at least seem incapable of pursuing it. The schools are indefensibly expensive. They may graduate students without essential skills and knowledge. They seem to place political and ideological indoctrination above intellectual curiosity and critical thinking as their emphasis. Many of them tolerate campus cultures that are hostile to men, Jews, and conservatives. Some of them now pay their student athletes, and demonstrate more passion over sports than academics.

So the University of Maryland decides that this is an ideal time to name Kermit the Frog as its commencement speaker.

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Ethics Short Takes

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

[I could and probably should do full posts on all three of these, but I still haven’t finished my promised Musk Derangement post, and I fear these items will be left neglected if I don’t cover them right away.]

1. President Trump signed an order beginning the process of eliminating the Dept. of Education and folding its essential functions back into other departments. Good. An act of Congress will be necessary to complete the dismantling, but if there is anyone with an honest, rational, statistically sound argument for why this Department should not go away, I haven’t heard or read it yet. The data is pretty damning: U.S. kids are doing much worse now than when the department was begun under President Carter. Post hoc ergo propter hoc and all that, but still, it’s hard to argue that a federal department overseeing an area that has deteriorated under its watch over almost 50 years has a case for continuing. Never mind. The Axis is freaking out anyway. Someone really ought to tell them that occasionally admitting that the President has done something responsible and justified might do wonders for their credibility.

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