college adminsitrators

The Rest of the Story: Hamline Has To Pay, But It’s Not Enough

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

One of the most nauseating displays of grovelling to student bullies and censors was the topic of this post at Ethics Alarms in January of 2023. Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor of art history at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, was going to discuss a famous 14th-century painting of Islam’s founder. Knowing that Islam forbids depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, she included a warning in her course syllabus that images of the Prophet Muhammad would be shown and studied in the course. Muslim students did not have to take the course. Students with concerns were told to to contact her, but none did. She again alerted students, at the start of the class, soany devout Islamic student could leave. No student left. But after Dr. López Prater showed the painting, a senior taking the course and who had remained for the class complained to the administration, and Muslim students who were not even in the course argued that the class was an attack on their religion.

So Hamline fired the professor. Emails to students and faculty agreed that she had engaged in “Islamophobic” conduct, and Hamline’s president at the time, Fayneese S. Miller, even issued an email saying that respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.”

Continue reading →

Cowardly And Unethical College Administrators…Again

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

The ethics of this controversy are easy. How could Hamline College administrators screw it up so badly? That’s easy too.

An adjunct professor of art history at Hamline University (in Minnesota, where strange things are always happening), Erika López Prater, knew that Islam forbids depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, so before showing a 14th-century painting of Islam’s founder, she alerted any Muslim students taking her class through her course syllabus that images the Prophet Muhammad would be shown and studied in the course. She directed students with any concerns to contact her. No student did.

Before the class in which paintings of Muhammad were about to be shown, she again alerted students in case anyone felt they needed to leave. No student left. But after Dr. López Prater showed a painting featuring the prophet, a senior in the class complained to the administration. Then Muslim students who were not in the course argued that the class was an attack on their religion. Guess what?

Hamline officials told Dr. López Prater that she was out. Emails to students and faculty pronounced the episode “Islamophobic.” Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, co-signed an email saying that respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” Continue reading →

And The Great Stupid Rolls On…[Corrected!]

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

…and, astoundingly, is getting even more stupid.

Take this story, for example.

The boulder above weighs about 70 tons.  Over 10,000 years ago, pre-Cambrian bedrock drift from Canada left it on what would become the campus of the Uiversity of Wisconsin in Madison,  or so it says on the boulder’s plaque. The rock was extracted from  the side of a hill in 1925, when Calvin Coolidge was President, and my father was five-years old, and placed in its current spot.

It was dubbed “Chamberlin Rock” after Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin, a 19th century glaciologist and University of Wisconsin president, given its  plaque memorializing him and placed at the university’s Washburn Observatory.

Suddenly, after 95 years,  the rock has become racist, and black students are demanding that it be removed. You see, long ago, the term “niggerhead” was commonly used to describe large dark rocks. (This is the second Ethics Alarms post about a rock called “niggerhead.” That one is also stupid, but not anywhere this stupid.)

“You clearly see what the rock was called and you can’t deny the history. Additionally you can’t deny the way it makes some people feel,” Black Student Union president Nalah McWhorter told Madison.com. “If you’re not going to move the things that are disrespectful to us because other students love it, put something up that us Black and brown students can celebrate.” Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/12/2020: I Admit It—I’m Fighting Hard To Avoid Getting Angry, Because I’m Not Ethical When I’m Angry

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

As we face these challenging times, we at Ethics Alarms salute the heroes, the indomitable, the resolute and the vibrant, who endure with good will and good cheer for the well-being of the community. We are Americans, and we are in this together, and

IF I HAVE to listen to insincere, calculated, virtue-signaling crap like this many more times, something is going to ‘pop!’ in my head and I’ll be  grabbing the nearest long, sharp implement and leaving the confines of these walls to begin the historic Alexandria Massacre.

Go ahead! Test me!

The rule in our house is that any channel that runs a commercial that begins with “In these..” or that shows someone wearing a facemask or looking at a webcam will be switched to another channel, never to be revisited during that day. If everyone follows this simple rule, and makes their policy known, maybe we’ll be able to halt this torture.

1.  What’s going on here? Is the idea now to proclaim how biased the news media is and the double standards it uses and mock those of us who care by showing there’s not a thing we can do with it? Is that it? Governor Cuomo actually said at a press conference yesterday  that the pandemic virus came from Europe in January and “no one knew” about it. “With all the sophistication, with all the public health organizations, with that whole alphabet soup of agencies, nobody knew the virus was coming from Europe,” the governor said, on the same day he finally retracted his deadly order requiring nursing homes to take in infected, elderly residents. Then he called the virus “The European Virus.” He really did. No, seriously. I’m not making this up.

The mainstream news media just ignored this idiocy yesterday, though President Trump calling the virus the Chinese virus, which except for the obscure papers Cuomo was apparently citing, is consistent with what most researchers have concluded about its origin, was attacked as racist because, you know, Big Lie #4.  Cuomo’s atrocious decision to expose nursing homes has also been barely covered in the left-leaning media.

2. If you are wondering why Ethics Alarms hasn’t covered in any detail the apparent emerging evidence that President Obama was intimately involved in the scheme to frame Michael Flynn, it is because there is literally no news source I can trust. Conservative sources are stating outright that Obama is squarely in “What did the President know and when did he know it” territory, with declassified documents indicating that Obama was aware of the bogus investigation and efforts to railroad Michael Flynn. The mainstream media appears to be doing what it did during Obama’s entire 8 years, which is refusing to probe suspicious activities and events, and maintaining the illusion that our first black President must be seen to be  as pure as the driven snow, because he was the first black President.  Unless a non-right wing source or reporter plays the role of the Watergate era Washington Post and “Woodstein” to get the truth out, we will be kept in the dark…and you know what the Post says happens in darkness. Continue reading →