Ethics Headlines            


Volume 2, Number 7
                            Friday, February 17, 2006


Ethics Headlines is an ethics-in-the-news clipping 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.

SUBSCRIBE. You can receive the file via email every Friday afternoon with links to the original articles. Just email your address here and put Ethics Headlines in the subject line. If you know of others who would be interested, please forward the page to them.

This week's headlines--select the headline to read the article
  • Vagina Monologues' divide Catholic schools. "When you put Catholic university in your title and your website looks like the Bells of St. Mary's, you set up an image that students expect," said Malcolm Kline, executive director of Accuracy in Academia, a non-profit watchdog group based in Washington. "What I get from parents and students is, 'I thought I was going to a Catholic school and they're showing the Vagina Monologues."
  • U.S. officials defend ploys to catch immigrants. Despite criticism from advocates for immigrants, federal immigration officials said in recent days that they would not forswear the practice of impersonating occupational safety officials to round up illegal immigrants.
  • Gonzaga students asked to stop yelling "Brokeback Mountain. " Fans of No. 5 Gonzaga have been asked to stop yelling "Brokeback Mountain" at opposing players. The reference to the recent movie about homosexual cowboys was chanted by some fans during Monday's game against Saint Mary's, and is apparently intended to suggest an opposing player is gay.
  • Internet-aided suicide pacts on rise in Japan. An increasing number of Japanese are killing themselves in suicide pacts made over the Internet, and service providers are struggling to develop ways to deal with the problem, according to recent press reports.
  • An F in ethics. The masterminds behind last year's online college application jam (in South Korea) have turned out to be some fellow students.  According to police investigations, those involved in the incident logged on to the Web sites providing the online service and eventually crashed their servers by repetitively signing on in an attempt to hamper the registration of other students and lower the acceptance rate.
  • Delta struggles with student code of ethics. At first blush, it seems like a sentiment college officials would embrace: "We recognize our responsibility to support the mission and values of Delta College and will honor our obligations to fellow students, to faculty, to staff and to the community." But the proposed code of ethical conduct for Delta students proved controversial for members of the Board of Trustees, who Tuesday returned the policy to faculty and students for revision.
  • Illinois student paper prints Muslim cartoons, and reaction is swift. Since the morning the cartoons satirizing the prophet Muhammad were republished in the student newspaper at the University of Illinois here, response has been swift and split.Muslim students and others held a protest on the main quadrangle on Tuesday, saying they were stunned and hurt by The Daily Illini's publication on Feb. 9 of the images that had stirred so much violence and caused so much pain in other parts of the world.