Ethics Headlines
#74       

Volume 2, Number 21
                            Friday, May 26, 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
  • Admissions officials lament practice of signing on with more than one college. The envelope arrived at Allegheny College the first week of May. Inside was a form signed by a high school senior accepting admission. Inside, too, was a $500 check — made out to St. Lawrence University. It turned out, said Scott Friedhoff, who oversees admissions at Allegheny, that the student had accepted admission offers from both colleges, and made deposits to each.
  • Should DNA be collected from all criminals? In most cities and states, vandalism, shoplifting, and loitering are misdemeanors - possibly involving community service, not jail time. But those who commit such low-level crimes in New York State may soon be required to give DNA samples to authorities - just as convicted rapists or murderers do.
  • Ward Churchill's comeuppance. After a national outcry for Churchill's head, including multiple accusations of plagiarism and academic fraud, a 12-member Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at the [University of Colorado] decided allegations regarding Churchill's "scholarship" warranted further investigation (they took a pass on looking into his purported Indian ancestry, which has been called into doubt by actual Indians and which he's never bothered to prove).
  • School district to monitor student blogs. High school students [in Libertyville, Illinois] are going to be held accountable for what they post on blogs and on social-networking Web sites such as MySpace.com.
  • Google News Boots Three Sites; Extremism or Just Bad Taste? In the last few weeks, Google's Google News feature has banned at least three news sources that focus on ultra-conservatism and Islamic extremists, according to those running the sites. Predictably, dropping the sites has spurred debate about hate versus free speech on the Internet.
  • Hillary blasts modern day Everest climbers’ “horrific” ethics. Sir Edmund Hillary, the first to scale Mt Everest in 1953, has severely criticised a recent incident whereby one the climbers hailing from his country New Zealand turned a blind eye from another climber who was in distress and dying because he ran short of oxygen while climbing down the peak.
  • The Duke case's cruel truth: hateful stereotypes of black women resurface. She was black, they were white, and race and sex were in the air. But whatever actually happened that March 13 night at Duke University -- both the reported rape and its surrounding details are hotly disputed -- it appears at least that the disturbing historic script of the sexual abuse of black women was playing out inside that lacrosse team house party.
    • Duke does Duke badly. Lynne Duke's article in the Washington Post on the Duke rape case is a noxious mix of racial innuendo and political correctness.
  • CNN report ignored ethical violations of unlicensed therapist who claims to "cure" homosexuals. On CNN's Paula Zahn Now, correspondent Deborah Feyerick outlined Parents & Friends of Ex-gays & Gays (PFOX) president Richard Cohen's efforts to promote a conversion therapy that purportedly "cures" homosexuality. But while noting that Cohen is an "unlicensed therapist," that conversion therapy is deemed "dangerous," and that a person counseled by Cohen said he was driven "to the edge of suicide" by the counseling, Feyerick failed to mention that Cohen was "expelled from the American Counseling Association (ACA) for multiple ethical violations," as The Washington Post has reported.

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