As I suggested in the post yesterday, bias and arrogance is a particularly toxic combination, and that is what we are seeing at Harvard now. Characteristically, the university is retreating to its traditional “Who are those low-IQ peasants to tell us what’s right and wrong?” stance.

Mediaite reported last night: “The Harvard Corporation, one of the two boards governing the Ivy League school, will meet Monday to discuss the future of President Claudine Gay in light of the fallout from her anti-Semitism testimony before Congress last week. The other governing body, Harvard’s Board of Overseers, met Sunday. Tensions are reportedly high at both boards over whether taking action would be worth it appearing that Republican. Rep. Elise Stefanik was able to ‘force’ an ouster.” I have not seen this anywhere else, but it’s so ineffably Harvard that I am inclined to believe it. Harvard’s leadership might decide not to take the correct and responsible action because they don’t want to appear to be bending to—yechh!—Republicans. The university would rather let its reputation and credibility fester, not to mention leaving the supposedly superior institution under the management of an administrator who has shown herself unable to handle the job, to avoid being momentarily on the same side as the people it teaches its students to despise and distrust. This is pure hubris, vanity, and pride.

Continue reading →

The outrageous performances of the three “context” obsessed college presidents teed up satirical possibilities like few other public events. The skit virtually wrote itself. The day of SNL’s latest episode, one of the three, UPenn’s Liz Magill, stepped down in disgrace. So handed this rich and easy topic for parody and high comedy, what did SNL’s writers choose to ridicule?

Why, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), whose sharp questioning and refusal to accept non-answers led all three officials to unmask leftist academia’s ethics rot, what Bishop Robert Barron described as their “Collapse of Moral Reasoning.” Instead of performing the clarifying function that effective and objective satire can provide (and that SNL has provided in the past, if you have a good memory), the show defaulted to circling the progressive wagons. The theme of it’s satire was “Republicans pounce!” as if there is nothing amiss when the leaders of three prestigious universities make legalistic arguments to justify allowing Jewish students to be targeted and threatened on their campuses.

Continue reading →

There were two major stories with ethics implications that arrived last evening after I had closed down Ethics Alarms for the night. Both involved institutions that involve lifetime connections for me. I’d prefer to write about the astounding $700,000,000 contract baseball’s biggest star Shohei Otahni signed—and will—but first I must again deal with another Harvard issue.

Late yesterday,the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, resigned, and the school’s chairman of the board followed with his own resignation a couple of hours later. Magill was one of three elite college presidents who embarrassed themselves and their employers with offensive, legalistic answers to pointed questions from Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) regarding their school’s tolerance of anti-Semitism on their campus in the wake of the October Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, and their weak responses to demonstrations on their campuses that could fairly be called threatening to Jewish students.

UPenn’s situation became critical when alumnus Ross Stevens announced that he was withdrawing a gift worth around $100 million. That would be a significant loss even for Harvard, whose endowment exceeds the treasuries of many nations. The resignation immediately focused attention on Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president of just a couple of months, whose responses to Stefanik’s withering cross-examination in the Congressional hearing were extremely similar to Magill’s. The resignation of all three women was called for in an unusual letter signed by 72 members of Congress, many of them Democrats.

MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth, the third inept president, had performed slightly better than her two counterparts at the Ivy League schools, though not by much. MIT leadership quickly gave her a public vote of confidence, reflecting, I think, the school’s calculation that its non-humanities and non-social sciences focus as well as its traditional position as only the second most famous university in Cambridge, Mass. would allow the controversy there to calm down sufficiently so it could get back to what the institution really cares about: technology, ones and zeros, and engineering. It is a cynical response, but a safe one.

Continue reading →

The Republican National Committee announced yesterday that it would be holding no more primary debates. It’s about time. The debates presented nothing, literally nothing, more than dart boards for Democrats and progressive pundits to aim at. Few watched the things other than desperate NeverTrumpers. If Donald Trump had participated, the four events might have been consequential. It would have been ethical and responsible of Trump to stand on the same stage as his competition and allow them to challenge him, but it also would have been stupid. He could only lose by taking that chance.

To celebrate the demise of this completely pointless exercise, Ethics Alarms offers a few observations on the final installment.

1. It began with a lie. Moderator Megyn Kelly: “On stage tonight, four candidates all vying to become their party’s nominee and given the state of affairs in our political system right now, one of you might very well do it.”

2. Ronald Reagan memorably said that it was a “commandment” that Republicans “shalt not” speak ill of any fellow Republican. RR was astute: these kind of scorpions-in-a-bottle displays only weaken the party and give aid and comfort to Democrats. Reagan’s “11th Commandment” seems especially relevant because a full half of the debaters last week were only there to troll the other Republicans on stage and, in bitter Chris Christie’s case, Donald Trump too. Neither the disgraced former New Jersey governor nor class clown Vivek Ramaswamy have a slice of an iota of a scintilla of a micro-chance of getting the Republican nomination, so they are wasting time, diverting attention, and indulging their egos to the detriment of everyone else.

3.Nikki Haley, sadly, is a weasel. Ramaswamy accurately characterized her bone-headed suggestion that anonymous statements and aliases should be forbidden on social media, and Haley denied it, then changed the subject. She could have simply said that she was wrong. That would have been refreshing. She can’t be trusted.

Continue reading →

Apparently all of the pro-terrorism vibes coming from the American Left these days prompted someone to finally reveal that Sean McDermott, head coach of the NFL’s Buffalo Bills, told his players at the 2019 training camp to emulate the teamwork of the plane hijackers who brought down the Twin Towers and bombed the Pentagon. After all, he explained, they “were all able to get on the same page to orchestrate attacks to perfection.” The coach led his player through the exercise of considering that daunting obstacles the attackers faced. “What tactics do you think they used to come together?” he asked.

I wonder why he didn’t use the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor instead. The Japanese really did a terrific job in achieving their mission. Or the way Santa Ana carried out the pre-dawn massacre of the men in the Alamo: that was quite a well-executed plan too. Come to think of it, I’d save that one until he has a coaching job in Dallas or Houston…

Continue reading →

I would think that the forum should be roiling today. It will also give me some time to finish a post about the aftermath of the humiliating performance by the three college presidents before Congress this week..

Call it “ethics dominoes.”

Long ago I added Snopes.com to the Ethics Alarms blacklist of untrustworthy websites for a series of dishonest and pro-Left “fact-checks” that were nothing of the kind. (You can see the once “urban legends” site’s Ethics Alarms dossier here.) For some reason—-maybe they want to restore their tarnished reputation before the 2024 campaign so they can be an effective Democratic Party hit squad again?—the site did a fact-check on this anti-Trump tweet, another volley in the current Big Lie #3 assault by the Axis of Unethical Conduct as it shifts into first gear in its “by any means necessary”effort to save Joe Biden and defeat Trump:

Snopes concluded that the Biden-Harris claim was contrived and false:

Continue reading →