indoctrination

KABOOM! The Tale Of The Third-Grader’s Racist Brownie Offense: No, I Don’t Understand This At All

/ Jack Marshall / 79 Comments

brownies explosion

This story made my head explode, and thus it will be tagged “Kaboom!” Unlike most such Kaboom! posts, however, this one is likely to make my head explode every time I read it. Or think about it. Forever.

On June 16, a third grader made a comment about the brownies being served to his class during an end-of-the-year class party at the William P. Tatem Elementary School in Collingswood, New Jersey.  After another student opined that the remark was “racist,” the school called the Collingswood Police Department.

Okay, stop. I’m puzzled already, and my head exploded again just writing that:

  • How could a comment about brownies be racist? Did the child say, ” As with human beings, the blonde brownies are innately superior to the dark ones”? Somehow, I doubt it.
  • Another third grader pronounced the statement as racist. Not a teacher, now. An eight-year old. How can that trigger anything, in a sane world, but a discussion led by the teacher about what is and isn’t racist, and how people shouldn’t leap to such  inflammatory observations, because it makes human interaction difficult if not impossible?
  • The school called the police department? For what? A threatened brownie massacre? How is this conceivably a police matter? Why did the police come?

“What is the nature of your emergency?” “A third-grader in my class made an inappropriate remark about brownies!” “Calling 911 with prank calls is a crime, ma’am. Don’t do this again.” 

It is per se unethical and irresponsible for any police department to treat such trivia seriously.

All right,slogging on… Continue reading →

Why Does Colby College Think That It’s Ethical To Keep A “Bias Incident Log”?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments
Might be time for a new motto, Colby. On the other hand...

Might be time for a new motto, Colby. On the other hand…

Wait…you say that more than a hundred campuses have this or the equivalent?

Oh-oh.

I am scheduled to teach a legal ethics class in the avoidance of bias in the practice of law next year, and I’m already worried. Past engagements of mine on this topic have been popular with attendees, but not always appreciated by my clients. The bar associations that make such training mandatory usually want to get someone to drone on about how lawyers should love Big Politically Correct Brother and search their souls for any germ of an attitude that would make Chris Matthews say they are racist, or the President of NARAL say they are sexist, or a Black Lives Matter activist call them privileged.  In other words, these are often devised as political indoctrination courses, using “bias” as code for “non-conforming thoughts according to progressive orthodoxy.”

I can’t and won’t teach that, because it’s as wrong as it is boring. Bias includes all ideas wedged in our minds that overcome reason and prevent just, even-handed, logical and fair decision-making. Bias makes us stupid, and for lawyers, the kind of bias I’m talking about undermines justice. Ironically, what most proponents of anti-bias courses want to do is instill biases that they and their partisan allies approve of. Once that is done, the Orwellian process is complete. “Bias” then means “not accepting our biases, which aren’t biases because we believe them, and we are good.”  The rationalization involved is 14. Self-validating Virtue.

The news and ethics issues are reaching one of those crisis points for me where everything seems to be connected to everything else, and I am torn whether to write one huge, conceptual post (the ones most readers skip) or a series of single episode posts. Facebook, a topic on its own, is revealing most of my friends whom I would identify as Democrats or progressives as in the grip of a crippling cognitive bias-based malady. Why did they think it was just wonderful for so many elected officials to deliberately ignore the core Constitutional principle of due process? Why did they reflexively attack the British vote to leave the European Union as “racist” or “xenophobic” rather than recognize it as a principled reassertion of their nation’s autonomy and democratic principles? How did freedom of speech, freedom of thought, true civil rights, and democracy itself become so alien to so many supposedly intelligent and self-proclaimed liberal adults?

Don’t worry, I’m coming back to Colby. It really does come down to bad and anti-American education poisoning the culture. In an excellent though disturbing essay on the Ethics And Public Policy website, Stanley Kurtz persuasively argues that U.S. education itself has turned against liberty, resulting in an increasing majority of citizens who do not believe or accept the virtues of core American ideals.

The incident that brought my attention to the Colby Bias Incident Log, which, at Colby and elsewhere, sends a Bias Response Team into investigation mode, was one in which a student was reported for allegedly using the idiom “on the other hand.”

No, this is not a hoax. It is not a joke. And what the fact that I am writing this suggests is far from funny. It is tragic. Continue reading →

Tales Of The Self-Righteous And Incompetent: Lawyer/Teacher Malik Leigh And His Donald Trump Exam Question

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Malik Leigh

Malik Leigh is an attorney who teaches in Palm Beach Lakes High School’s pre-law academy. He submitted an exam for review, as the school requires of all tests, that included this question:

“If Donald Trump becomes president of the United states, we are:

A.) Screwed

B.) Screwed

C.) Screwed

D.) Screwed behind a really YUGE wall that Mexico pays for.”

In another question on the same test, this lawyer—and I’m still trying to get my mind around that embarrassing fact— asked

“When performing an opening statement, it is best to:

A. Wink at the Judge

B. find the hottest person on the Jury and focus your words on them

C. Speak to them as if they are cordial friends.

D. Treat them like the MORONS they are.”

Leigh was suspended.  The letter he received from Principal Cheryl McKeever announcing the suspension stated that the questions contained “inaccurate content, irrelevant material, unprofessional use of language, inappropriate use of language.” Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Dear Harvard: Fire President Drew Faust And Dean Rakesh Khurana”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Polar bear snowstorm

Not a comment on the post so much as on the underlying conditions that spawned it, Ethics Alarms reader Chris Bentley weighed in on the lack of ideological diversity on campus and the fact that many leaders both educational and political think that’s just fine. The key  question: do you listen to an argument against what you may believe with an open mind, or a closed one? The ethical answer is “Open,” but the predominant mindset on college campuses believes there isn’t any question to that effect.. Wrong is wrong, and the Left is Right, so the the only question is, “Do you allow those with wrong ideas speak at all?”

It is terrifying that universities, of all places, would ever consider that issue unsettled in the United States of America.

Here is Chris Bentley’s Comment of the Day inspired by the post, Dear Harvard: Fire President Drew Faust And Dean Rakesh Khurana:

“They know best, after all.”

Only a tertiary connection to the topic, I know, but I just got done listening to Obama’s Howard Univ. speech. While there is no doubt that he is a captivating orator, one thing kept striking me. The repeated refrain to the students, that they needed to “listen” to those that they disagree with, and not try to have speakers who think differently from you banned from campus, b/c, as his grandmother used to say “Don’t do that…Every time fool speaks they are just advertising their own ignorance. Let them talk.”

Continue reading →

Dear Harvard: Fire President Drew Faust And Dean Rakesh Khurana

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments
If these idiots are off-campus, 1) GOOD and 2) it's none of the college's business.

If these idiots do this off-campus, 1) GOOD and 2) it’s none of the college’s business.

In an e-mail to undergraduate students and the Harvard community, University President Drew Faust announced that beginning with next year’s entering class, undergraduate members of unrecognized single-gender social organizations will be banned from holding athletic team captaincies and leadership positions in all recognized student groups. They will also be ineligible for College endorsement for top fellowships like the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships.

The unrecognized single-gender social organizations are what is left of the old fraternities and sororities. When the Greek system was banned many decades ago (and Harvard was an all-male college), the frats reorganized as exclusive college clubs located in houses around Harvard Square in Cambridge. After Harvard merged with all-female neighbor Radcliffe College in the Seventies, sorority-like clubs emulated their male counterparts. In 1984, Harvard issued an ultimatum to the clubs to go co-ed, and the clubs responded by disaffiliating with the University.

Wrote Faust in part:

“Although the fraternities, sororities, and final clubs are not formally recognized by the College, they play an unmistakable and growing role in student life, in many cases enacting forms of privilege and exclusion at odds with our deepest values. The College cannot ignore these organizations if it is to advance our shared commitment to broadening opportunity and making Harvard a campus for all of its students….Captains of intercollegiate sports teams and leaders of organizations funded, sponsored, or recognized by Harvard College in a very real sense represent the College.They benefit from its resources. They operate under its name. Especially as it seeks to break down structural barriers to an effectively inclusive campus, the College is right to ensure that the areas in which it provides resources and endorsement advance and reinforce its values of non-discrimination.”

Faust was following the recommendation of Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana’s recommendations, who wrote in his report on the results of a “study”,

“[T]he discriminatory membership policies of these organizations have led to the perpetuation of spaces that are rife with power imbalances. The most entrenched of these spaces send an unambiguous message that they are the exclusive preserves of men. In their recruitment practices and through their extensive resources and access to networks of power, these organizations propagate exclusionary values that undermine those of the larger Harvard College community…Ultimately, all of these unrecognized single-gender social organizations are at odds with Harvard College’s educational philosophy and its commitment to a diverse living and learning experience.”

Let us be clear what Harvard is trying to do here. It is seeking to punish students for their associations and activities unrelated to the school itself, and using its power within the limits of the campus to indoctrinate ideological values and require conduct that is unrelated to education. This is a rejection of the principle of freedom of association, one of those enumerated rights protected by the Ninth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, and a cornerstone of American principles. If the college can, in effect, create a blacklist withholding institutional honors from those who choose to belong to an all male or all female club completely distinct from the university, what clearly delineated line prevents the same institution from declaring that membership in the Republican Party, Occupy Wall Street, Americans For Trump or the NAACP are similarly undermining its values?

There is no such line. Continue reading →

Read ‘Em And Weep: The Jefferson Muzzle Awards

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

muzzle-banner

 Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression (TJC) hands out yearly “awards” to  government agencies that show themselves hostile to free speech.  This year, however, the Jefferson Muzzle Awards were reserved for various colleges, as the increasingly radical left institutions of higher learning, spurred by such groups as Black Lives Matters and the craven administrators who quiver in fear of them, have scarred freedom of expression over the past year in a multitude of ways.

Fifty schools got their ceremonial muzzles—the Muzzies?—in five categories:

1. Censorship of Students
2. Censorship by Students
3. Efforts to Limit Press Access
4. Threats to Academic Freedom, and
5. Censorship of Outside Speakers

Here they are.

And it’s not funny.

_______________________

Pointer: Instapundit

“Zootopia” Is Unethical—But Funny!

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I think you should see “Zootopia,” and maybe even let your children see it, provided that you are prepared to spend about two hours deprogramming them afterwards. Thus you may not want to read further unless you want to encounter numerous spoilers.

Children’s stories, TV shows and movies have long been the vehicle for moral and ethical messages, as well as allegories that may or may not worm themselves into unsuspecting juvenile psyches. Because there are young minds involved, engaging in what can be value-warping and indoctrination if not handled with proper humility and care is a high calling, and for the most part, Disney has always been up to the task.

I like Disney animated movies, and always have. I even like some of the flops, like “Treasure Planet.” Pixar, which is now part of the Disney creative empire, has been even more daring and aggressive in ethics story-telling, and has not seriously abused the privilege. Other studios, like DreamWorks, have been more heavy-handed in their moralizing. No animated film in memory, however, has set out to pound specific political and social points of view into the brains of kids as blatantly, relentlessly and ambitiously as “Zootopia.”

I should add “incompetently.” Like all fantasies with delusions of social significance, “Zootopia” relies on metaphors, and in this film, they become a tangle of confused and sometimes contradictory and hypocritical messages. Wrapped as they are in an often charming, funny, well-acted and well-plotted piece of technically expert art, these muddled messages approach being sinister. That the film has been almost universally praised—it has an amazing 98% positive rating on the review site “Rotten Tomatoes”—speaks either to a culture-wide conspiracy to turn the next generation into political correctness zombies, or to the mass incompetence of the film reviewing profession. Continue reading →

More Casting Ethics: In Search Of Acting Afghans

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

whiskeytangofoxtrot

The problem is that our educational system belches out new graduates who have been indoctrinated into rigid and often absurd ideas about right and wrong, They quickly fill the culture with those ideas and their freedom-stultifying emanations. The ideas act like viruses: if you don’t diagnose them and wipe them out, our very minds are at risk.

Here is an example, by mere coincidence, concerning casting ethics, the same topic as the recent post about how some African-Americans seem to want to discriminate on the basis of skin shade, at least when it comes to casting movies. (Who knew?) I was reading Entertainment Weekly on an airplane, as I only read Entertainment Weekly on airplanes, and this whole issue (The “Batman v. Superman” issue) struck me as being written by 22 year-olds. In a review of Tina Fey’s latest bomb (“Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”—“WTF,” or What the Fuck, get it?), reviewer Leah Greenblatt wrote this…

“And its more than a little disappointing that the two major Afghan supporting roles are filled by obviously non-Afghan actors….”

Leah doesn’t bother to explain why it’s a little disappointing; she just assumes it’s obvious, as in, “What? They didn’t hire real Afghans to play Afghans? I’m outraged!” Meanwhile, a young impressionable reader who assumed that a film reviewer has some expertise in such things, would absorb this heretofore unknown standard of decency and take it as cant. Contagion! This is how the political correctness virus eats our brains. Continue reading →

Unethical High School Assembly Video Of…What? The Month? The Year? Eternity?

/ Jack Marshall / 164 Comments

This video, purportedly a defense of affirmative action, was mandatory viewing for students at Glen Allen High School in Henrico, Virginia:

This isn’t education. This is anti-American, race-baiting indoctrination, political in intent and orientation, and absolutely irresponsible for use in a high school. This school, of course, has students of both races, so the video also encourages racial distrust, divisions, and hate.

Naturally, many parents object, though I doubt any are objecting more than I would.

The school was unapologetic:

“The students participated in a presentation that involved American history and racial discourse. A segment of the video was one component of a thoughtful discussion in which all viewpoints were encouraged. As always, we are welcoming of feedback from students and their families, and we address concerns directly as they come forward.”

A classic of  double-speak spin from incompetent, power-abusing educators. You don’t teach children about complex issues by reducing them to simple-minded cartoon agitprop, but then, education, however, is not the objective. The clear motives are racial spoils, white guilt, black entitlement, and partisan advantage.

Oh, Fine, And I Already Burned My Diploma: Harvard Apologizes For The “Holiday Placemats for Social Justice”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Well, that was fast! Good for Harvard, and good for Idrees M. Kalhoon…

apology Harvard

I wonder when all those other colleges and universities are going to apologize?

No, the letter isn’t perfect: the issue isn’t that the placemat confused the community, unless the deans mean that students were confused because they thought they were attending a university that was above this kind of nonsense. Actually, I doubt many were confused at all, and correctly concluded that Harvard, having already inflicted upon itself the idiocy of an Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, was getting exactly what such authorities deliver: politically correct, leftist indoctrination.

Well, I guess the deans couldn’t say, “This embarrassed our entire institution, and we will be throwing all the hacks responsible for this monstrosity into the Charles River at 3:00 PM, tomorrow. Cucumber sandwiches and mulled wine will be served.”

(Though I wish they had…)

It’s gratifying to know the “feedback” (“ARE YOU KIDDING ME? IF YOU DON’T RETRACT THAT CRAP AND BURN THOSE STUPID THINGS IN 24 HOURS, THERE ARE GOING TO BE SOME NEW DEANS AROUND HERE, CAPICHE?” Sincerely, The Harvard Board of Overseers.) was sufficient to prompt a quick retraction, and especially gratifying to know that the nation’s flagship private college still embraces the mission of nurturing “independent minds.”

Now maybe it will examine whether a grossly unbalanced ideological culture on campus is a rational way of doing that.