Comment of the Day: “Ethics Dunce: Emerson College President Jay Bernhardt”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

You know how I love it when a reader saves me the trouble of writing a post by beating me to it. That’s what Steve-O-in NJ did with this Comment of the Day.

The letter sent to the Columbia University community by Minouche Shafik the school’s embattled, feckless, over-her-head president, has so much wrong with it that I would have been forced to do a fisking, and I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, putting it mildly. Here’s Steve-O’s excellent performance of that task, in his Comment of the Day to the post, “Ethics Dunce: Emerson College President Jay Bernhardt”…

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This is the president of Columbia’s letter to her school after the NYPD finally took action:

Dear members of the Columbia community,

Early Tuesday morning, tensions on our campus rose to new heights when a small group of protestors broke into Hamilton Hall, barricaded themselves inside, and occupied it throughout the day. This drastic escalation of many months of protest activity pushed the University to the brink, creating a disruptive environment for everyone and raising safety risks to an intolerable level.

I know I speak for many members of our community in saying that this turn of events has filled me with deep sadness. I am sorry we reached this point. Over the last few months, we have been patient in tolerating unauthorized demonstrations, including the encampment. Our academic leaders spent eight days engaging over long hours in serious dialogue in good faith with protest representatives. I thank them for their tireless effort. The University offered to consider new proposals on divestment and shareholder activism, to review access to our dual degree programs and global centers, to reaffirm our commitment to free speech, and to launch educational and health programs in Gaza and the West Bank. Some other universities have achieved agreement on similar proposals. Our efforts to find a solution went into Tuesday evening, but regrettably, we were unable to come to resolution.

Because my first responsibility is safety, with the support of the University’s Trustees, I made the decision to ask the New York City Police Department to intervene to end the occupation of Hamilton Hall and dismantle the main encampment along with a new, smaller encampment. These actions were completed Tuesday night, and I thank the NYPD for their incredible professionalism and support.  

I also want to thank all of the many people, including faculty, staff, and especially our public safety officers and facilities workers, for their tireless efforts on behalf of Columbia and to support our students through this difficult period.

Columbia has a long and proud tradition of protest and activism on many important issues such as the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Today’s protesters are also fighting for an important cause, for the rights of Palestinians and against the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza. They have many supporters in our community and have a right to express their views and engage in peaceful protest.

But students and outside activists breaking Hamilton Hall doors, mistreating our Public Safety officers and maintenance staff, and damaging property are acts of destruction, not political speech. Many students have also felt uncomfortable and unwelcome because of the disruption and antisemitic comments made by some individuals, especially in the protests that have persistently mobilized outside our gates.

It is going to take time to heal, but I know we can do that together. I hope that we can use the weeks ahead to restore calm, allow students to complete their academic work, and honor their achievements at Commencement. We also must continue with urgency our ongoing dialogue on the important issues that have been raised in recent months, especially the balance between free speech and discrimination and the role of a university in contributing to better outcomes in the Middle East. Both are topics where I hope Columbia can lead the way in new thinking that will make us the epicenter, not just of protests, but of solutions to the world’s problems.

Sincerely,

Minouche Shafik

President, Columbia University in the City of New York

Soooooo…what’s missing? 

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Ethics Half-Hero: Houston Astros Slugger Jose Abreu

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Astros first baseman José Abreu, 37, signed a three-year deal with a $58.5 million dollar guarantee last year that goes through the 2025 season. It was a risky free-agent signing: baseball position players peak at ages 27-29, and by 30, virtually all of them are declining unless they take the Barry Bonds route and cheat. Most are no longer MLB-worthy by age 34, though the better a player was, the more he can decline and still be valuable. (Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski had almost exactly the same season in his last year as he did as a rookie 22 years before: a perfect bell curve.) In the first year of his Astros deal, Abreu showed unmistakable signs that the jig was up. He had career lows in batting average, on-base pct., slugging pct., OPS (obviously: it’s slugging plus on-base average) and home runs. He was a below-average batter after a career of being All-Star caliber.

This season Abreu has been even worse. As the perennial World Series contender Astros have looked old, hurt and busted, he has been the worst of the bunch. He currently is batting .099 in 71 official at bats, with no homers; in fact, he ranks as the worst hitter in baseball right now.

Today came the stunning news that Abreu has agreed to go to the minors. As a veteran with over five years of major league service time, Abreu could not be optioned to “the bushes” without his consent, and veterans almost never give their consent. For an established star player to go to the minor leagues is like moving from the Ritz Carlton into a Motel 6. Abreu is a particularly unlikely exception, for he never played in the minors, coming directly to the major leagues as a refugee Cuban player.

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Ethics Dunce: Emerson College President Jay Bernhardt

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Bernhardt isn’t the only noodle-spined, terrorism-enabling fool running an American college or university right now, but he’s as good a representative as any. I’m familiar with Emerson (most people weren’t before its students started demonstrating for more Jew killing as if there hadn’t too much of that already) because it resides in my old stomping ground of Boston, and my aunt Bea, 97-years-old and still as progressive as they come, graduated from there.

Over 100 Emerson students were arrested in downtown Boston’s Boylston Place alleyway in an early morning confrontation with Boston police last week. The students were illegally participating in an encampment protest by the student organization Students for Justice in Palestine. They also fought with police as the cops tried to do their jobs. But in his letter of three days ago, Emerson College President Jay Bernhardt said that he will urge the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office to drop all charges. Four Boston police officers were injured during the confrontation, one seriously. Never mind, though. These are only adults who can vote, buy liquor and and otherwise have full privileges of citizenship, and they violated the law in support of terrorists. Their hearts were in the right place. They meant well. Anybody can make a mistake. For a full list of the inexcusable rationalizations being used to let these idiots escape accountability for their ignorant, illegal and violent actions, see here, at the Ethics Alarms Rationalizations List. I’m guessing at least 40 of them apply, maybe more.

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Early Evening Ethics Cool-Off, 4/30/2024: Marxist Indoctrination Petard Hoist Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Hitler committed suicide on this date in 1945. Good. Maybe he would have stuck it out if he knew American college students, primed by a youth dominated by reckless indoctrination, would be trying to carry on his work in 2024 on American campuses. Meanwhile…

1. Déjà vu! The moment I lost all sympathy or respect for the students at my college demanding various things while taking over buildings and disrupting my education was when they added amnesty to their “demands.” The terrorist assholes at Columbia are doing the same thing now. Nobody should give serious consideration to the positions of such cowards. Writes David French, “When universities can actually recognize and enforce the distinctions among free speech, civil disobedience and lawlessness, they can protect both the right of students to protest and the rights of students to study and learn in peace.” And when I can fly to the moon by flapping my arms, I’ll save a fortune on gasoline. The vast majority of today’s college administrators—Haven’t female college presidents just covered themselves in glory lately? Another DEI triumph!—are the direct ideological descendants of those arrogant, unaccountable revolutionaries of yore.

These ignorant, terrorism-enabling jerks have good reason to assume there will be no consequences, since (I don’t know how or why) their cause is apparently justified lawlessness sanctified by the political Left, you know, like the George Floyd riots and Occupy Wall Street. When you break laws to demonstrate your frustration after a dodgy election, however, you end up like the J6 defendants, prosecuted and locked up. MSNBC’s Joy Reid—why is she on television?—compared the “Get rid of the Jews” protesters to the Civil Rights movement. Over at ABC’s “The View,” Sunny Hostin, the lawyer who thinks an eclipse is evidence of climate change, argued that critics who use “anti-Semitism” to describe the protests are “far-right” with “authoritarian leanings” who oppose free speech. “They don’t want students on these campuses to voice their opinions,” she said. Sunny, as anyone who has listened to her rantings know, would be calling for the executions of students chanting anti-black or anti-gay slogans, but “Kill the Jews” is good, old fashioned anti-war sentiment in her book. (Why is she on television?)

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The NFL Has Allegedly Safer Helmets. Hmmmmm….

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I wouldn’t trust the NFL as far as I could throw a football, so excuse my cynicism.

The most unethical sports league on the planet announced that its players will be able to choose between 12 new helmets next season. Five of the new helmets, we are told by the league and the NFL Players Association, “performed better in laboratory tests” than any helmet that has ever been worn in the NFL. Quarterbacks will be able to choose choice a helmet made by Vicis and another one made by Riddell designed specifically to reduce a quarterback’s head trauma from hitting the ground, the cause of most quarterback concussions. Other positions have their own specially-designed helmets to choose from.

The NFL first introduced position-specific helmets in 2022 for linemen. So far all of the new “safer” helmets are voluntary (except in practice games) and players have not been enthusiastic. The NFL also provides optional “guardian caps,” soft shell covers on top of helmets that provide extra cushioning and enhanced safety for head-to-head contact. These have no been popular with players, perhaps because they look like that thing above.

The NFL and the NFLPA now distribute a poster illustrating how helmets rank based on their performance in lab tests. This season there will be three individual posters , one for offensive linemen, defensive linemen and quarterbacks, supposedly to educate players about their helmet choices.

Now comes the cynicism: why is this so complicated? Why is the choice of helmets left to the players? Why aren’t the safest helmets mandatory during the season? Imagine a seat belt law that gave motorists a choice of a dozen different seat belts, with the option to choose none at all also being in the mix.

It looks to me like a lawyer-devised strategy to reduce the league’s liability for CTE cases. If a player sticks with the old-fashioned helmet and ends up with IQ of a summer sausage in his fifties, the NFL can claims that it was assumption of the risk.

____________

Sources: NFL, NBC

Regarding Those “Shocking” Poll Numbers…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

OK, this should really be the lead graphic…

but Claude Rains is always welcome here because he makes me laugh, and boy do I need one today.

Over the weekend the Axis needed one, because its members were freaking out over polls by organizations that in the past (like 2020), reliably employed their unethical bias to inflate pro-Democrat Presidential race poll numbers, now showing Joe Biden substantially trailing Donald Trump. Here’s another one:

James Carville is a good stand-in for the whole amusing spectacle…

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Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck Update: A Case Study in How a News Aggregator Forfeits Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The escalation overnight in the anti-Israel, pro-Jew-killing demonstrations at Columbia University, temporarily at the top of the campus progressives-showing-their-true-stripes and “Oops, I guess we indoctrinated these gullible kids a little too much!” hit parades, was the breaking news I woke up to at 5 am when Spuds asked to go out. I have some ethics observations about this whole disturbing development (the Gaza support on campuses, not Spuds’ bathroom habits), which the Biden administration deserves to have hung around its neck like a stinking dead albatross for signaling that the U.S. sympathizes with terrorists just so it might pick up some Muslim votes in Michigan. In the process of researching that post, I encountered the reason for this one.

Deciding that the immediacy of the 1968 flashbacks justified bumping another post that I have almost completed, I checked the usually reliable news aggregating site Memeorandum (Ann Althouse’s favorite!) to find some early reports and commentary on the student terrorism fans at Columbia taking over Hamilton Hall. And I found…nothing. The top stories as of this moment [remember, by the time you read this, the list may have changed]:

#1: The Kristi Noem dog story! You see, that’s a top story because it reflects poorly on Republicans.

#2 according to the site is an FBI report that crime in the U.S. is really decreasing under Biden—as if there is any reason to trust the FBI any more, and as everyone I know in Northern Virginia is terrified to go into D.C. This is second on the list because it is going to take a huge “It isn’t what it is” push to convince voters that all of those chains moving out of inner cities because of runaway shoplifting are really doing it because they are racist.

#3? Another hit on a Republican, this time from that paragon of objectivity, Rolling Stone.

Coming in at #4…well, I don’t have to belabor the point. There are seventeen more “top stories,” including one about India operating a spy ring in Australia, and the drama at Columbia isn’t anywhere to be found.

Eureka! Now I know that whoever is running this news aggregator site is manipulating the news and trying to mislead the public in support of Joe Biden and the Democrats. Similarly, we have learned that the eruption of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic passion across the nation is just one more example of what a terrible, weak, foolish POTUS Joe Biden is, and how ethically corrupt his party and its supporters have become.

Here’s a third: journalism in this culture is untrustworthy and a metaphorical dagger in the back of democracy….but we knew that.

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Did You Know Donald Trump Will Violate the Constitution? You Know, Like Biden’s Department of Agriculture…But That’s GOOD Discrimination, See…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Biden Administration’s Department of Agriculture (USDA) is distributing disaster and pandemic relief funds to farmers based on their race and gender, in direct defiance of the equal protection provisions in the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law. The USDA openly prioritizes relief money to “socially disadvantaged” farmers: women, American Indians or Alaskan Natives, Asians or Asian-Americans, blacks or African-Americans, Hispanics or Hispanic-Americans, and Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. White men, not so much. Farmers who fail to meet the “socially disadvantaged” criteria have received far less assistance for their losses than if they were of a different race or sex. Can’t do that—but the racists, bigots and woke in Joe’s USDA do it anyway. USDA has a smoking gun form, CCC-860, Socially Disadvantaged, Limited Resource, Beginning and Veteran Farmer or Rancher Certification, hopeful recipients of government aid must file to swear that they are not evil, undeserving, patriarchal and racist white males:

“I certify that I am a member of a group listed below, whose members have been subject to racial, ethnic, or gender prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities. (Check all that apply but note that if only “women” is checked without selecting the other category, the selection does not make the applicant socially disadvantaged for conservation programs).”

  • Women.
  • American Indians or Alaskan Natives, Asians or Asian Americans, Black or African Americans, Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders, Hispanics.

That’s pretty clear, no? And yet, in a masterpiece of “It isn’t what it is” rhetorical dishonesty, the form then says,

“In accordance with Federal civil rights law and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) civil rights regulations and policies, the USDA, its Agencies, offices, and employees, and institutions participating in or administering USDA programs are prohibited from discriminating based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity (including gender expression), sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, family/parental status, income derived from a public assistance program, political beliefs, or reprisal or retaliation for prior civil rights activity, in any program or activity conducted or funded by USDA.”

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This Is How My Late Wife Grace Handled the Euthanizing of a Dog…

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Some of the comments on this post compel me to cross-post the following story from Facebook, as I continue to try to deal with the sudden loss of my wife on Leap Year. The contrast with Kristi Noem’s cruel and impulsive shooting of a young dog that displeased her didn’t occur to me for some reason until I read the recent posts of readers here.

Today I was driving home from the vet’s with Spuds and his newly drained ear, and “I Will,” Paul’s sweet little song from the White Album came on the radio. (“Who knows how long I’ve loved you…”)

Grace envied singers and always wanted to sing herself, but was convinced that she couldn’t…I tried to tell her that she didn’t have a bad voice and should take some coaching, but she wouldn’t do it. When she wanted to sing, only with me, she deliberately used a fake voice, either a high falsetto or sometimes a weird guttural voice that sounded eerily like Pazuzu in “The Exorcist.”

Grace shared her mother’s and oldest sister Edie’s deep connection to animals: all three loved them so much the animals could sense it. If one of our dogs or Kibber the cat had some wound or problem to be tended to, they would only let Grace do it: it was almost mystical.

When our beloved 160 lb. English Mastiff, Patience, had her cancer return in her seventh year (Grace paid $12,000 for her treatment when the cancer first appeared and didn’t tell me for years…I didn’t mind: Patience was worth it, and it bought her another year), the sweet, sensitive dog was so brave…she had no appetite and was fading away, but she always wagged her huge tail when Grace came near. One day, as we knew Patience was running out of time, I returned from an errand to find Grace lying on the floor with her head at Patience’s ear. She was singing softly in her real voice, “I Will” to Patience as the dog slowly wagged her tail. Grace had tears pouring down her face, and pretty soon, so did I.

Over the next few days, Grace sang that song to Patience every time she seemed uncomfortable or agitated, usually beginning with, “Don’t be afraid!” and then, softly, “Who knows how long I’ve loves you…” And Patience would look into her eyes, and wag.

Three days later, we called a vet who made house visits to come and end our dog’s suffering. We probably waited too long. Patience had to tell us it was time by wandering out of our back yard down the hill into the bamboo; I had to persuade her to come back. She had gone off to die. As the vet fed the fatal drug into the vein in Patience’s leg, Grace was lying right by Patience’s side with her arm around her. She sang “Who knows how long I’ve loved you” until that big tail stopped, and Patience was gone.

I’m so glad that Grace never heard the Kristi Noem story.

“Bias Makes Harvard Incredibly Stupid,” the Series! Today’s Episode: “The Law of Holes”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

One of the downsides of denouncing my alma mater is that I only hear about its latest unethical conduct when the story imposes itself on my consciousness or when the alumni magazine arrives, usually containing news that it a month old or more. I was going to write about the last two, post-Claudine Gay presidency issues, which were fascinating as exercises in denial, spin, and self-delusion: the framing of Harvard’s most recent debacle was essentially that “something happened” to Old Ivy, you know, like an earthquake or a plague of frogs. These are supposed to be smart people. Instead, America is auditing a Harvard course on just how stupid bias can make us. Well, that’s a lot more useful than a lot of Harvard courses now.

But even I didn’t see this coming: I didn’t think Harvard could be this stupid. I really didn’t; when I saw this headline in the Washington Free Beacon, my first thought was that I had hit the Babylon Bee on an unfunny day. No, not only was it true, the story was two weeks old.

As the Harvard Crimson had announced on April 16, Vivian Hunt (seen here in a student production of “The Handmaiden’s Tale” or something—I don’t know what the hell she’s wearing or why, but it’s weird)…

… is the newly appointed head of the Harvard Board of Overseers. Hunt is a Harvard College alum, female, black, a likely affirmative action success, and a vocal DEI activist, even more of one, arguably, than disgraced ex-prez Claudine Gay.

Hunt is nearly “patient zero” for the DEI plague. In 2015 she co-authored the McKinsey consulting firm’s influential and dishonest paper, “Why diversity matters,”based on data that has recently been shown to be junk as many (like me) long suspected. She has vigorously argued that meritocracy “isn’t good enough” and urged the private sector to hire based on color and gender rather than that old-fashioned, busted, racist, “talent, ability, and demonstrated success” formula.

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