In “Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?,” Suzy Weiss writes as if students taking advantage of loose standards and professorial sloth to cheat is a recent phenomenon. I can assure her (and her readers) that it’s not. The example she begins with brought back nasty memories for me.

When it was time for Sam Beyda, then a freshman at Columbia University, to take his Calculus I midterm, the professor told students they had 90 minutes. 

But the exam would be administered online. And even though every student was expected to take it alone, in their dorms or apartments or at the library, it wouldn’t be proctored. And they had 24 hours to turn it in.

“Anyone who hears that knows it’s a free-for-all,” Beyda told me. 

Beyda, an economics major, said students texted each other answers; looked up solutions on Chegg, a crowdsourced website with answers to exam questions; and used calculators, which were technically verboten. 

He finished the exam in under an hour, he said. Other students spent two or three hours on it. Some classmates paid older students who had already taken the course to do it for them. 

“Professors just don’t care,” he told me.

The online wrinkle is obviously an addition to the mix, but I encountered this exact scenaio at Georgetown Law Center. My Constitutional Law professor, Nathan Lewin, gave the class a take-home, open-book, self-timed mid-term exam. We were to complete the multi-question essay test in a single session of three hours precisely, which is exactly what I did, dropping my pen mid-way through the last question. After I turned the exam in, I was informed by several classmates that I was a sucker. Continue reading →

That was the predictably partisan slant of Vox regarding the highly skeptical reception Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness bribe to young voters in the run-up to the 2022 midterms got from most of the Supreme Court Justices in oral arguments in two cases, Biden v. Nebraska and Department of Education v. Brown. But that’s Vox for you.

Whether the $400 billion treasury heist is Constitutional or not, it is definitely unethical to the core, and not just because the U.S. is already approaching—has surpassed?—perilous National Debt levels during an administration determined to buy votes and power. Responsible taxpayers are going to be forced to gift irresponsible students who took out loans they couldn’t afford, with many hoping they wouldn’t have to. Responsible college graduates (or their parents) who paid back all of their student loans or never got them will be played for chumps. This is the measure that Vox, and to be fair, most of the mainstream media, is representing as wonderful.

The legal and Constitutional disputes are closer than the ethical one. A sloppily drafted 2003 law authorized the Secretary of Education to address emergencies, in full knowledge, one assumes, that the party favoring brute federal power believes that “no emergency should go to waste.” The language of the law is especially dangerous in an era where much of the Democratic Party is is openly totalitarian in methods and rhetoric. The Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003, the HEROES Act (Oooo! Such a clever acronym!), gives the Secretary of Education power to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” to protect borrowers affected by “a war or other military operation or national emergency.”

Like all laws now, most Senators and House members probably didn’t read or think about the bill carefully if at all: it was a post 9-11 reflex. President Bush didn’t have the sense to veto it either. Now, thanks to the contrived “national emergency” of the pandemic, there is at least a colorable claim that the act enables the obscene giveaway. It might be stupid, but SCOTUS is supposed to decide if it is legal.

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For some reason, Black History Month and the corporate pandering to it have really bothered me this year. The streaming services all have special race-segregated categories this month, for example. I just heard a promo on the Sirius MLB channel with an announcer from a vintage game clip (the one where Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s career home run record) screaming that a “black man is now baseball’s all-time home run champion!” What matters is that Henry Aaron broke the record, regardless of his skin shade. Funny, I don’t recall anyone noting, when Barry Bonds broke Aaron’s record aided by illegal drugs, that “a black man is now baseball’s first all-time home run champion to achieve the distinction by cheating!”

Meanwhile, professional organizations felt it necessary to present programs like this one, by the New York City Bar:

The national obsession with race is a sickness, and only perpetuates division and distrust. It has to stop.

1. Ugh! More unethical web list misinformation...I checked out another of those annoying on-line “slideshows,” this one purporting to list the 35 “Best Movies That Are Actually True To History.” Some of the selections were valid (notably “Gettysburg”), but there are too many better choices than most included on the list to count, and one in particular was unforgivable: “Saving Private Ryan.”

My father regarded that film as offensively unrealistic, and wrote the military advisor on the movie to complain in a 20+ page memo. Details aside, however, the entire plot conceit of the “film”Private Ryan” was absurd, and an insult to General George Marshall. There is no way Marshall would have made the welfare of a single GI a higher priority than ensuring a successful post-Normandy invasion campaign, but that is what Spielberg’s film imagines. Furthermore, the letter allegedly written by President Lincoln that inspires Marshall’s crack-brained scheme in the film has been pretty conclusively proven to have been authored by John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary. Not only that, but the object of the letter, the tragic mother who had supposedly lost five sons in Civil War battles, definitely didn’t.

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In a rare burst of semi-competence, Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel said today that any candidate who wants to take part in the GOP’s first primary debate in Milwaukee later must sign a pledge promising to support whoever wins the nomination.

The measure is obviously aimed at presumed Republican front-runner Donald Trump, who has already signaled that he believes the 2024 GOP nomination is his by right. Trump is a threat to run as a third party candidate if Republican voters come to their senses and support a less divisive candidate before next year’s national convention.

In fact, he’s a threat to do that with or without having signed such a pledge. If his status as a human ticking time bomb is to be minimized, the party must also:

• Make such a pledge also a requirement to run in any of the GOP primaries, and
• Require it for Trump to be entered into nomination at the 2024 Convention, and,
• To make the pledge on video, stating that it is being made to the American people as well as the party.

Finally, the Republican Party must bite the metaphorical bullet and arrange to have all primaries include a run-off between the top two candidates. In any herd of aspiring candidates, Trump will end up in front easily. In a two candidate race with a less toxic adversary, he’ll lose.

We are about to see how seriously the Republican Party takes its obligation to do what is in the  best interests of the United States of America.

Maybe John Nolte of Breitbart had the best of intentions, but his essay “We Should Accept Jane Fonda’s Apology About Vietnam” is an ethics mess.

To begin with, the title is deliberately misleading: his real point has nothing to do with Jane Fonda. He begins with Jane to set up an analogy that doesn’t even work. “After 35 years of apologies, isn’t it time to forgive and move on? Should someone who has repeatedly apologized over four decades still be called on the carpet and asked to continue to explain herself?,” Nolte asks, referring to Fonda’s self-created infamy when she went to North Vietnam and praised Ho Chi Minh while condemning American GIs who were fighting and dying in combat with his army. Who is Nolte talking about? Most American under the age of 60 don’t know anything about Fonda’s war protest activities. “Move on” to what? Fonda hasn’t suffered any horrible fate because of her betrayal. Nobody “canceled” her. OK, the woman is nearly 90 and regrets some of her past decisions. What old lady doesn’t? I believe she’s sorry; her anti-American rhetoric probably cost her some work-out video income. It sure didn’t cost her any roles or party invites in Hollywood. She’s also probably sorry that she did the Atlanta Braves “tomahawk chop” when she was Ted Turner’s trophy wife, too. So what? If a 75-year-old Vietnam vet chooses not to forgive Jane Fonda for aiding and providing comfort to the enemy who was trying to kill him in the jungles of Vietnam, who is Nolte to say he has to?

I confess, I am pre-conditioned not to take anything published on Breitbart as persuasive; it has been on the Ethics Alarms banned list for many years and will remains so. Nolte also loses credibility with me when he gushes that Jane “is one of the greatest actresses who has ever lived.” He needs to apologize for that, and the apology needs to be addressed to Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange, Glenn Close, Vanessa Redgrave, Greer Garson [I left Garson out when this was first posted: unforgivable.], Maggie Smith, Viola Davis, Cicely Tyson, Ellen Burstyn, Geraldine Page, Nicole Kidman, Glenda Jackson, Audrey Hepburn, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Norma Shearer, Greer Garson, Ingrid Bergman, Judi Dench, Judith Anderson and Ann Bancroft, among others. Fonda has been a capable actress in a narrow range for a long time. She was better than her brother and not as good as her father. But one of the greatest of all time?

Stay in your lane, John.

But I digress. Fonda was disingenuously used by Nolte to tee up a terrible analogy. He writes,

All of America’s manufactured racial problems come down to a group of leftists (of all colors) who refuse to forgive and move on when it comes to slavery and Jim Crow. It’s not enough that hundreds of thousands of white Americans died to settle the matter of slavery. It’s not enough that after 5,000 generations where slavery was accepted as normal, it was Western Civilization that put an end to it. It’s not enough that two Constitutional amendments were passed to end American discrimination or that a black president was elected and re-elected, or that no American living today has ever owned or been a slave.

Why is it not enough?

Because with these race hustlers, fascists, and crybabies, it can never be enough. By not accepting America’s countless apologies and countless attempts to atone, they keep us divided, at each other’s throats, angry, and unable to heal.

You see, that’s the whole thing: If you don’t want a relationship to heal, you refuse to accept the apology and move on. That’s the secret to destroying a friendship or a marriage… No matter how sorry and contrite the offender is, you can destroy the relationship by constantly throwing whatever this person did in their face. And that’s what the left is doing to America and to millions of Americans…

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