integrity

Ethics Hero Emeritus: Baltimore Orioles Pitching Great Mike Flanagan,1951-2011

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Mike Flanagan, for more than three decades an ace pitcher, coach, executive and broadcaster with the Baltimore Orioles, died of a self-inflicted shotgun blast this week. It is obvious from listening to his devastated colleagues, former teammates and friends that he was genuinely loved and respected, and one reason was his overwhelming decency and strong ethical compass. Many members of the Orioles family recalled how Flanagan was known for taking young players aside and schooling them on how to represent the team with dignity, honor, fair play, hard work, and integrity.

In his lovely column today remembering Flanagan and his values, Washington Post sportswriter Tom Boswell recounts how the ex-pitcher once explained why he wouldn’t cheat. Many sportswriters and former player have offered the argument, during the continuing ethical debate over the culpability of players using steroids, that it is only natural that an athlete, any athlete, would cheat to prolong his career. Flanagan showed why they are wrong, and why we should never excuse unethical conduct on the grounds that “anybody would do it.”

Boswell: Continue reading →

In the Aftermath of Biden’s Human Rights Betrayal, Little Integrity From The Media

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Like Diogenes of Sinope searching for an honest man, Ethics Alarms has been searching for a political progressive, here or anywhere, who will acknowledge the blatant pro-liberal, pro-Obama, anti-conservative, anti-Republican, anti-Tea Party bias of the mainstream media. Obvious examples are routinely explained or rationalized away, even when they are criticized by a media outlet’s own internal ombudsmen and ethicists.

The media’s coverage of the recent toadying remarks of Vice-President Biden to the Chinese, as he gave a pass to China’s  long-time policy of limiting families to one child, has been a particularly vivid and disgraceful case in point. Despite the fact that Biden’s remarks were a shocking diplomatic gaffe and human rights betrayal, they were almost solely criticized by Republicans and conservative pundits, and only fleetingly covered at all by the mainstream media. While the so-called “conservative media” kept Biden’s gaffe in the news, the rest either covered the coverage, as in “Right Wing Critics Attack Biden,” or framed the criticism of Biden as a pro-life vs. pro-choice dust-up, as if anyone but a lunatic could describe a program limiting births by law  as “pro choice.” Continue reading →

Texas Gov. Rick Perry: Ethics Hero REVOKED, Integrity Missing

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Wow, that was fast.

Rick Perry has Jenny McCarthy's vote back...and that's worth a little more cervical cancer, right Governor?

It didn’t take long for newly-minted GOP presidential contender Rick Perry, now leading in the polls, to tell us what we needed to know about his values and integrity.

He doesn’t have them.

Back in 2007, I awarded Perry an Ethics Hero designation for leading Texas to become the first state in the nation to mandate vaccination of young girls for the human papilloma virus, or HPV, which is sexually transmitted and can cause cervical cancer. “Requiring young girls to get vaccinated before they come into contact with HPV is responsible health and fiscal policy that has the potential to significantly reduce cases of cervical cancer and mitigate future medical costs,” Perry said then in a news release explaining his executive order. Now, however, Perry is declaring what I thought was a courageous decision four years ago “a mistake.”

I hereby revoke his Ethics Hero award. Continue reading →

Would Dennis Rodman Qualify for the Baseball Hall of Fame?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Dennis Rodman, out of uniform

Of course not. Dennis Rodman didn’t play baseball. He was a pro basketball player, and as of yesterday, an inductee into the NBA Hall of Fame for his exploits on a basketball court. There is no question that he is eminently qualified for admission to the NBA Hall of Fame, because the NBA Hall of Fame doesn’t care if players are thugs, drunks, scofflaws, deadbeat dads and couldn’t define sportsmanship with a dictionary as long as they can shoot, score, pass, dribble and block shots.

The Major League Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, however, requires that its members demonstrate “integrity, sportsmanship, (and) character,” in addition to outstanding achievements and a remarkable career record.  Because of the steroid era that has rendered a whole generation of players suspect for cheating, an expanding number of baseball greats face being excluded from the Hall because cheating by using substances that are illegal and banned in the sport while implicitly deceiving the public about the use is, by any rational definition, a material breach of integrity and sportsmanship.  The natural reaction by many sportswriters, as in other fields when reasonable standards are routinely violated, is to attack the standards. Why should a sport care about matters like integrity and character? Isn’t it the performance that counts, and winning? Continue reading →

Comment of the Day #2, On the Pointless Marriage of Bert and Ernie

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Marrying a puppet is illegal in all 50 states, plus the Dictrict of Columbia.

This is where maintaining integrity and consistency becomes tricky.

Obviously the Comment of the Day suggests only one, yet for some reason this particular day has generated an unusual number of contenders, all deserving. If I refuse to highlight any of these because a Comment of the Day was already posted, I am obscuring important content to maintain a rule, in a situation where the rule doesn’t have any benefits.

But if I have more than one “Comment of the Day,” that creates a precedent and suggests that the designation is more of a formal verdict on comment quality than it is meant to be.  I simply do not, and do not have the time to, give Comment of the Day status to every deserving post. One is usually plenty, and will remain so. But it is foolish, and a contradiction of the principles I argue for on Ethics Alarms, to withhold recognizing a valuable comment for no reason other than an admittedly arbitrary limit.

So here is Comment of the Day #2, on what I will, for this time only, designate as Comment of the Day Friday, as Jeff is inspired by the discussion of bigotry in the continuing discussion generated by Enzo and the Contessa, to weigh in on a particularly stupid news story, the appeal by some gay marriage advocacy groups to have Bert and Ernie, of Sesame Street, tie the knot…if gay marriage is legal on Sesame Street.

(Yes, I know: this is a Comment of the Day on a Comment of the Day on a Comment of the Day. Curse you, Jeff!) Continue reading →

Major League Baseball, Forgivability, and List Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Unforgivable?*

Bleacher Reports is an enjoyable sports website, and it gives opportunities to aspiring writers and bloggers, some of whom are quite talented.  In addition to typical opinion pieces and reporting, the site has a fondness for lists, often trivial to the extreme, like “The 50 Ugliest Athletes of All Time.” The titles are all misnomers, because there is almost never any criteria given for the choices or their relative ranking. An accurate title would be, “The Fifty Athletes I Think Are The Ugliest.”  And of course, who cares? (Don Mossi, by the way, was the ugliest athlete ever, no matter what anybody says.)

A recent list, however did bother me. It is called “The Fifty Most Unforgivable Acts in Baseball History,“ and much of the problem with it lies in the title itself. If you are going to write about history, there is a duty perform diligent research, even for a silly online list. Misrepresentations online have a large probability of misleading people.  The title is a misrepresentation, like “The 50 Ugliest Athletes,” but unlike that list, there is some harm done. The list isn’t close to complete; it isn’t consistent; it isn’t well-researched. I’d bet that the author, Robert Knapel, wrote it off the top of his head.  Anyone who looked at the list and assumed, as the author represents, that these are truly the low points—“the dark side,” as the author puts it—of major league baseball would be seriously misinformed.

There are unequivocally, probably universally recognized incidents and events that are infinitely worse that most of the items on the list.  Just a  few samples: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Atlanta Parents’ Verdict: Cheating’s No Big Deal; Grades Are What Matter!”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Is this the current condition of public education?

Michael, a teacher, delivers a powerful but depressing comment in response to the post about Atlanta parents, at least in one school, siding with the cheating teachers and administrators in the school system’s testing scandal. In the original comment he also includes some videos that are amusing, sharp, and illustrative. I didn’t import them here, but you can find them with the original post.

“…I am not positive that the education system can be fixed anymore. The teachers don’t feel that teaching is their job and they are proud of it. In many cases, they feel their noble goal is to teach only the amount of material the slowest student in the class feels like learning. The flip side of their mission is to make sure that no one else in the class learns more than that student. We can’t have people getting all ‘uppity and learnin’ or anything like that. The principals believe this is the way to go, the school boards think everything is hunky-dory, and the parents like the fact that their kids are all getting good grades. Any teacher that actually wants to teach the children is drummed out by the other teachers and the students.

“Our school system stopped using books. Why, you might ask? Because they are only teaching the parts of the subject covered on the state test. They know what will be and what won’t be covered and they just don’t bother teaching what won’t be on the test. They stopped issuing books so no one would get suspicious as to why they were only on chapter 4 of 12 at the end of the year. The attitude this breeds in the children is horrific….

“The terrible thing is that they are ruining these students for life. When you are young, your brain is set up to learn. This becomes harder later on. We waste all their learning years sitting them in a classroom learning nothing. Then they go home, watch reality TV and text. When they are in their late 20′s and they don’t know how to do math, not much can really be done.”

Atlanta Parents’ Verdict: Cheating’s No Big Deal; Grades Are What Matter!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Atlanta's integrity is burning, and its students are the victims

Here is one reason American education is in the sorry state that it is.  And speaking of sorry states, how about that Georgia?

After  revelations of a massive conspiracy among teachers and administrators across Atlanta’s schools to fix the scores on state-mandated tests, parents at least one of the schools vocally supported the teachers involved. At a town hall meeting, parents praised the education their children received from the cheaters.

“We’ve been extremely pleased with the instruction my children have received,” said Quinnie Cook-Richardson, a parent at the West Manor Elementary School. Her child’s teacher had him reading within a year, she said. “They are an example of what is right with Atlanta Public Schools.” Cook-Richardson was among a many parents who defended the school, teachers and  the principal who has been asked to resign as a result of the scandal.

Why are parents defending cheating school personnel? They are defending them because the parents don’t care about cheating, ethics or integrity; they just care about their children getting good grades on the tests. They care about results and credentials and their children succeeding, and if cheating helps, that’s just fine with them. This why their children cheat, as they almost certainly do and will; it is also why the teachers and administrators cheated. It isn’t the culture of the schools that is corrupt;  it’s the culture of the entire community, parents and students included.

And are we so naive that we can believe that this corrupt culture, in which education is seen as nothing but marks on a transcript, and values like integrity and honesty are seen as impediments to “education” rather than  part of it, is confined to a few schools, or Atlanta, or Georgia?

This our nation’s culture in 2011.

We had better start recognizing it, and repairing it.

Fast.

Comment of the Day: “The Folly of Sacrificing Integrity to Kindness in Competitions”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Today’s Comment of the Day is on the post about using awards and honors to make the less fortunate and unqualified feel good, as Michael carries the issue into the related matter of grading:

“I run into this every semester. I can’t give anyone a C in a class. I can’t give anyone a B in a class. You have to earn it by demonstrating that you understand and can apply the relevant material. You may be the most attractive, most charitable, most loved person on the planet, but if you can’t do this work, you can’t pass. Usually, they still don’t understand, and I have to give a speech I title “What a C student does.”

“Where do my ‘C’ students go? What do ‘C’ students do after they leave? ‘A’ and ‘B’ students go to graduate school, medical, and dental school. They may hold people’s lives in their hands in their careers. But what about the ‘C’ student? Surely there is no harm in letting someone squeak by with a ‘C’? Well… they test your water to make sure it is safe. They determine what amounts of new pesticides can be used without causing harm. They run the tests that determine if you raped someone or if that really was a bag of cocaine in your car, or just some borrowed powdered sugar (as you insisted). My ‘C’ students work jobs where people die if they mess up. The ‘C’ stands for competence. If you don’t have it, you don’t get a ‘C’. Continue reading →

The Folly of Sacrificing Integrity to Kindness in Competitions

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

"Great idea, Mandy! Let's elect President Obama our school Homecoming Queen! He could use a a boost."

Integrity. 

Violate it at your peril. This is especially true if you are running a competition, no matter how trivial it might be.

Not only may a momentary waiver of integrity for what seems like an admirable cause permanently render a competition and the honor of winning it meaningless, it well may inspire the well-meaning and misguided to stretch the questionable logic of your decision to the breaking point.

Almost everyone has seen the heart-tugging TV ad from the mysterious Foundation for a Better Life, in which a high school girl with Down Syndrome is crowned Homecoming Queen. (“True Beauty. Pass it on!”) It bothered me the moment I saw it—at least after I wiped the tear from my eye. Based on a real incident in Missouri in 2008, the spot illustrates an ethical conflict between kindness and caring on one side and fairness and integrity on the other.

Of course this was a nice thing to do. It was undeniably kind, and the student involved will surely regard it as a high point in her life. But what does the Homecoming Queen title mean now, once it has been awarded for purposes completely divorced from its original purpose? If there is another Down Syndrome student in future years who doesn’t get a crown, will this indicate to her that she is less deserving of the award, and somehow lacking, since, after all, a girl like her won in a past year? Continue reading →