quotas

Ethics Hero: Jerry Seinfeld

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

One wonderful thing about extreme success combined with middle age is that you can, if you have the integrity, speak unpopular truths without caring who objects. Thus it was the Jerry Seinfeld correctly dismissed as irrelevant and misguided the suggestion that seeking racial and gender balance should be an objective in his comedy shows. In response to a question challenging his Web series, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee“as too white and male, the comedian said:

“People think it’s the census or something, it’s gotta represent the actual pie chart of America. Who cares? Funny is the world that I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested. I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that, but everyone else is, kind of with their little calculating, “Is this the exact right mix?” To me, it’s anti-comedy.  It’s more about PC nonsense than ‘are you making us laugh or not’.”

Exactly. Not that the race and gender bean counters will let Seinfeld escape with an explanation of such obvious common sense. Here’s Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher playing his full hand of gender, race, guilt and quota cards: Continue reading →

Integrity, Politics, and Medal of Honor Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Medal of Honor

Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, a Marine veteran who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, is leading an effort to loosen the standards being applied to the awarding of the Medal of Honor for combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.  In an Oct. 4 letter to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Hunter argued that Medals of Honor are being denied in cases where they appear to be well-deserved and that the process of approving awards takes too long. He asked the Defense Department to conduct a review of hundreds of such cases. “Properly recognizing these actions through the awards process is not just important to the individuals involved, but it is also essential to upholding the tradition of the armed forces and inspiring others to step forward,” Hunter wrote.

Great: now we have an advocate for heroism inflation. Continue reading →

Nettleton Middle School, Embracing Racism in 2010

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Help me out here: which category does this story fall under:

  • School administrator incompetence?
  • Warped community ethical  standards?
  • Racial quotas run amuck?
  • Evidence of human devolution?
  • Proof that time travel is real?

I’m not sure. I do know that when a memo like this one is issued by a school principal, indicating that class officers for the sixth, seventh and eighth grades are restricted by race, there had better be a lot of firing going on, really soon, up and down the entire school system and maybe the town government as well, because the people in charge must not be trusted for one more second to have anything to do with educating American children. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“One of my students this year has a vaguely Hispanic name but is literally the whitest girl you’ve ever met. Her mother straight out asked, ‘If we mark she’s Latino on the application, is that something that they would ever challenge?’ I told her honestly my best guess, which was no. And, if early admissions are any indication, it seemed to work.”

—-A  guidance counselor (and former Ivy League admission officer) at a private school in the South, quoted by Kathleen Kingsbury in her report for The Daily Beast on dubious college admission tactics.

This, of course, is completely unethical for both the student and the counselor, who is exactly like a tax attorney or accountant who lets a client know that his fraudulent return will almost certainly not be audited by the I.R.S. Both of those professionals violate their ethics codes by aiding and abetting such conduct, and the quoted counselor is just as bad.

What should the counselor have said? Continue reading →