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How Can Schools Teach Students About Citizenship And Rights When They Don’t Know What Rights Students Have?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments
Sorry about this, Tiffany, but your school definitely can't suspend ME...

Sorry about this, Tiffany, but your school definitely can’t suspend ME…

Today’s example of totalitarian school tactics committed by administrators who should be attending classes rather than overseeing them comes to us from Memphis, Tennessee. Highland Oaks Middle School suspended three students for posting a teacher’s mugshot on Instagram. Eighth grade teacher Tiffany Jackson had been arrested for driving with a suspended license, and a student discovered her mugshot online. He posted it,  and many more students re-posted the picture.

How could students posting public information on their own Instagram accounts be grounds for punishing them?  It isn’t. The school has no right to do this, and suspending students for such protected conduct just serves to intimidate them  and other students from exercising their rights as citizens.

That, of course, is the idea.

I agree that it wasn’t kind or fair of the students to set out to embarrass a teacher, but that’s a matter for discussion—education, perhaps— not discipline.

There has been a disturbing amount of deliberate or ignorant trampling on student speech lately, notably the University of Oklahoma expelling students for a constitutionally-protected racist chant, but also in high schools across the country where personal social media posts have been and are being treated as grounds for discipline. This is not to be tolerated from educational institutions in a democracy. Schools are fond of n0-tolerance: I can’t think of any conduct that should be less tolerated than teachers and administrators trying to control legal conduct and protected speech by students that occur off school grounds. We need to raise citizens who understand and respect individual rights, not burgeoning fascists who think that authority can and should shut down speech and conduct it doesn’t like.

At Highland Oaks Middle School, administrators eventually overturned the suspensions. I don’t care: fire them.

For this has to stop.

Meanwhile, welcome to the Streisand Effect, Ms. Jackson! Thanks to your employers trying to cover-up your offense by muzzling your students, everyone is seeing your mugshot. Just trying to do my part to discourage this blatant abuse of power….

_________________________

Pointer: Res Ipsa Loquitur

Facts: WNC Action 5

 

Janay Palmer’s Ethics Fallacy Cornucopia

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

horn_of_plenty

I suffer pangs of conscience as I do this to Janay Palmer, who has plenty of other pressing problems, but it you are going to put out a public statement on social media that threatens to melt the ethics alarms of millions, you can’t reasonably expect me to stand by and take it.

Palmer produced this on Instagram in response to the NFL’s bizarre do-over on her husband’s punishment, which combined with his team, the Baltimore Ravens, releasing him as persona non grata, effectively makes Ray Rice an ex-star running back for the foreseeable future:

I woke up this morning feeling like I had a horrible nightmare, feeling like I’m mourning the death of my closest friend. But to have to accept the fact that it’s reality is a nightmare in itself. No one knows the pain that the media & unwanted options from the public has caused my family. To make us relive a moment in our lives that we regret every day is a horrible thing. To take something away from the man I love that he has worked his ass off for all his life just to gain ratings is a horrific [sic]. THIS IS OUR LIFE! What don’t you all get. If your intentions were to hurt us, embarrass us, make us feel alone, take all happiness away, you’ve succeeded on so many levels. Just know we will continue to grow & show the world what real love is! Ravensnation we love you!

Observations:

  • Who is her “closest friend?” Ray Rice, her husband and sparring partner? If your best friend is prone to punch you silly in elevators, I think your relationship either has trust issues, or should have. Does she mean his career, which is what actually “died”? That’s telling, if so, and crassly. Was her best friend really Ray’s 8 million dollar a year pay check? Did that justify standing up for the right of rich, famous celebrities to knock their arm-candy around when they think nobody’s looking?
  • Competence check: like it or not, Janay is in the public eye, and what she has to say right now is likely to be read far and wide. How about having someone literate check out your screed before reminding us again what a cheat the public school system is?
  • Janay’s husband beats her unconscious, she lets him get away with it and sends the message to women trapped in abusive relationships that security and a ring is worth the occasional black eye, and her position is that Rice’s demise is the fault of the media and the public? Let’s go to the videotape, shall we?

Continue reading →

Is There An “Almost Naked Lovely Lawyer Principle”?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

cathy-mccarthy

Not really.

But it’s complicated.

Cathy McCarthy (above) is a 2013 graduate of Loyola Law School-Los Angeles, and she is sounding the clarion call for the right of bikini model-lawyers to be taken seriously. She wrote…

I graduated law school a year ago after receiving an academic scholarship and passed the California Bar last November on my first try. I am also a model and have had moderate success, building fan base of over 26,000 people where I do mostly bikini promotions. Does this make me better or worse at my job? According to some people, it makes me unable to be taken “seriously” in the business community. In fact, two weeks ago, I was reprimanded by a coworker for my online presence and was told to “handle the situation.”I fought back and was ultimately let off the hook, but this is not the first time that I have faced backlash from colleagues who think that a lawyer should not also get the privilege of “looking hot in a bikini.”

Unlike the case with primary and secondary school teachers, where a published presence on the web that is sexually provocative can interfere with a healthy student-teacher relationship, there is no automatic impediment to a lawyer client relationship posed by the lawyer moonlighting as a bikini model, a fold-out, or even a porn star. The profession acknowledges this in several legal ethics opinions affirming lawyers’ First Amendment rights. Lawyers can express themselves any way they choose, provided that it does not undermine their ability to represent their clients in any way. Continue reading →

When Worlds Collide: Maryland’s Attorney General Doug Gansler Flunks His Ethics Test

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler (D) is running to be his party’s nominee for Governor, which, since Maryland is one of the Bluest of states, means that success equals the statehouse, or should. But the intense spotlight that such a quest creates can be hot and unflattering, and Gansler’s character and integrity is now being called into question…especially after this photo from last summer surfaced on Instagram, showing Maryland’s top law enforcement official in the middle of a wild teen beach party at a beach house by the Delaware shore. He’s the guy in the white shirt and the cell phone:

Gensler Party

There you have it: the exact moment when Attorney General Doug Gansler, Candidate for Governor Gansler and Father of a Teenage Son Who Graduated From High School And Wants To Party With His Friends Like In “Animal House” Gansler officially collided. Many, especially many Democrats, especially many Bill Clinton fans, and definitely aspiring toyboy lawyer Brian Zulberti, would argue that only one of them is really there: Father Doug. The others, being absent, are immune from criticism. This position is popular, convenient, lazy, ethically corrosive and wrong. There is only one Doug Gansler, yes, but he is bound by three standards of conduct. When you are bound by three standards of conduct, you have to abide by the highest one.

Again, this situation focuses our attention on integrity, a core aspect of character, and crucial to ethics. Does an individual have genuine principles that he oe she lives by, or a constantly shifting set of values that are assumed and then discarded according to situation, convenient, strategy and whim? When an ethical problem arises, do others know how the individual will respond? Are his words consistent with his actions? Trust means that others can rely on an individual’s conduct, and you can’t rely on the conduct of someone whose values and priorities with the wind, locale, attention and personal desires.

Then there is the issue of judgment. Judgement is like intelligence and common sense: an individual either has it, or he doesn’t. And such traits as responsibility, accountability, honesty, prudence, dignity, loyalty  and courage come into play. I know those who embrace the private individual/professional dichotomy are stuck with the argument that the absence of  one or more of these in a private setting has no predictive value regarding public or professional conduct, but it is a hopelessly untenable position, pure denial, and ethics poison. Continue reading →

Comments Of The Day: “Clash of the Ethics Dunces: The Web-shaming Student and the Angry Principal”

/ Jack Marshall / 95 Comments

Tugowar

In May, Ethics Alarms opined on the reported story of a student who set out to embarrass his principal by “web-shaming” her regarding an assumed  DUI arrest that was in fact an arrest for something less serious, and her subsequent reaction, which I regarded as excessive based on the published accounts. The principal, Jamille Brown, then endeared herself to this blog by taking the time to post her own account of what occurred, and also by showing grace and good humor in the process. Now she has given us a more thorough account of the incident from her perspective, in the form of a letter she has sent to the TV station that reported the story initially, WSBTV

In response to it, our own Grand Inquisitor, tgt, has carefully critiqued her account, making some perceptive points. Together the two posts exemplify the collaborative nature of our ethical explorations here, and I am grateful for them.

Here are the Comments of the Day, by Jamille Brown and tgt, on the post “Clash of the Ethics Dunces: The Web-shaming Student and the Angry Principal”.

First, Ms. Brown: Continue reading →

Clash of the Ethics Dunces: The Web-shaming Student and the Angry Principal

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments
This doesn't make either of you look very good, guys....

This doesn’t make either of you look very good, guys….

Back when hitch-hiking was in vogue and both hitch-hikers and drivers were being warned about the various horror stories that the transportation transaction had led to through the years, I used to wonder if a murderous hitch-hiker ever got into the car of a homicidal driver, and what ensued. This tale from Riverdale High School (yes, the same school Archie and Veronica go to, apparently), in Georgia is a little like that, though no slaughters were attempted. An ethically inert school principal grossly abused her power in response to a gratuitously cruel student. I suspect this happens rather more often than my hitch-hiking hypothetical.

Student Keandre Varner, on a lark, decided to check and see if a mug shot existed for his high school principal, Jamille Miller Brown.  Sure enough, he found one, so he thought the fair, kind and responsible thing to do was 1) post it on Instagram, and 2) suggest that the mugshot arose from a DUI arrest. Continue reading →