Drake University

Celebrities, Teachers And Pacs, Oh My! Partisan Hatemongers And What To Do About Them

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NecK4MwOfeI

Wow. Joe Biden eking out a White House win with the outrageous help of a biased news media and the intervention of a pandemic has certainly inspired progressives who wish isolation, violence and punishment on those who dare to disagree with them to out themselves with wild abandon! Three particularly ugly examples, and what to do about them:

I. The Teacher

At Drake University, Associate English Professor Beth Younger has continued that stream of hateful tweets that included one on October 26, 2020 that said, “I was just pondering how much hatred I feel towards all the republican assholes. They need to suffer.” This month, she has added tweets saying “men are trash,” insulting Senator Josh Hawley with “fuck of you piece of shit,” calling Mike Pompeo a “fucking moron and a traitor,” and one referring to Melania Trump as a “terrible human.”

Marty Martin, the President of Drake, sent an email to faculty, staff and students last week, reading,

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Roger Williams, Consequentialism, and “Born Free”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Roger Williams in his 80's. Take THAT, Drake!

Roger Williams, the pianist whose hit renditions of songs like “Autumn Leaves” and “Born Free” are pop culture generational touchpoints, died this week. One item in his obituary has double ethical significance:

“While majoring in piano at Drake University in Des Moines, he began developing a style that was a fusion of jazz, classical and pop. When a school official overheard him playing the tune “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” he was expelled because the school had a “classics-only” policy…”

It is both encouraging and depressing to learn that school administrators were just as doctrinaire, unreasonable, unfair, incompetent, stupid and willing to abuse their power while playing with the lives of young people back in the 1940’s as they are today—encouraging, because that generation seems to have come through it pretty well; depressing, because this field appears to have a flat learning curve.

Mainly, however, Williams’ run-in with music snobs at Drake beautifully illustrates what is wrong with the consequentialist argument that we should assess the ethical nature of an act based on its consequences. Continue reading →