Ethics Headlines            


Volume 1, Number 16
                            Friday, April 22, 2005


Ethics Headlines is an ethics-in-the-news clippling file published each Friday by Greg Feldmeth, a high school teacher at Polytechnic School in Pasadena, California. It contains news items from the media in the past week that deal with some area of ethical inquiry.

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This week's headlines--click on the headline to read the full article
    • Academic boycott: bashing Israel. Sadly, if predictably, Israel has once again been cast as the ultimate global villain by British academics. The call to boycott Israeli academic institutions has hundreds of supporters in Europe, nourished by a growing climate of anti-Zionism that is often indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.
    • Student ordered to stop posting old tests. A University of Wyoming student who tried to sell copies of old tests over the Internet, then gave them away, has been ordered by the school to remove the material from his Web site.
    • What's in a name? Parents and teachers should know. Teachers may use a child's name as a signal of unobserved parental contributions to that child's education, and expect less from children with names that 'sound' like they were given by uneducated parents. These names, empirically, are given most frequently by blacks, but they are also given by white and Hispanic parents as well.
    • So we turn a blind eye to genocide, again. When Turkey was massacring Armenians in 1915, the administration of President Woodrow Wilson determinedly looked the other way....we've looked away [again] as 300,000 people have been killed in Darfur, with another 10,000 dying every month.
    • Public hedonism and private restraint. Sex is more explicit everywhere - on "Desperate Housewives," on booty-quaking music videos, on the Internet - except in real life. As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious.
    • When you can't understand the teacher. A North Dakota bill asking colleges to assess the English skills of teaching assistants kicks up a storm of controversy. The proposal would remove them from teaching roles if 10 percent of their class complained that they didn't speak clearly. That set off alarm bells for some academics, since research has shown that student evaluations aren't necessarily reliable measures of a teacher's effectiveness.
    • Probe: 'pundit payola' was poor judgment, but not illegal or unethical . The Education Department paid $240,000 to Armstrong Williams, a commentator with newspaper, television, and radio audiences, to promote President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" law, but... the department's inspector general said there was no evidence of legal or ethical violations.
    • As merit-aid race escalates, wealthy often win. Sandy Baum, professor of economics at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and senior policy analyst for the New York-based nonprofit College Board, said the private colleges' use of non-need-based aid encourages wealthy applicants and discourages those with little money.
    • Justice on trial in Russia. Russia's image and the standing of President Vladimir Putin have taken a major beating because the trial of Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky had the air of politically motivated vengeance and looting. Investor confidence has been shaken. So was it worth it?
    • Baseball hecklers cry foul about taunting crackdown. Despite President James Wright's repeated assurances that no speech codes exist at Dartmouth, a number of students expressed concern over the weekend that they were unable to exercise their freedom of expression at College sporting events.
    • U.S. ally Uzbekistan teaches interrogators how to boil suspected terrorists to death. Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray told of the range of advanced techniques used by Uzbek interrogators: "drowning and suffocation, rape was used . . . and also immersion of limbs in boiling liquid."
    • Texas House endorses ban on gay foster parents. The Texas House of Representatives has passed a bill that would make the state the only one in the nation to bar gays from becoming foster parents.
    • Ethics chairman proposes probe of Delay. In an ethics stalemate that is rivaling the most partisan legislative struggles, House Republicans are proposing an investigation of Majority Leader Tom DeLay while threatening to put several Democrats under scrutiny as well.
Previous Weeks' Headlines