Ethics Headlines
#82

Volume 2, Number 28                                                Friday, July 28, 2006


Ethics Headlines is an ethics-in-the-news clipping file published each Friday by Polytechnic School teacher Greg Feldmeth. 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
  • Chancellor at SIUE concedes plagiarism. The head of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville has apologized for not properly attributing portions of a speech he delivered during a commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In an e-mail to faculty and staff, SIU-Edwardsville Chancellor Vaughn Vandegrift said Friday the failure to attribute portion of the speech was "completely unintentional and not deliberate."
  • The best defense. Could you represent a man charged with sexually abusing a child? Could you cross-examine the child in hopes of poking holes in the story? Would it matter to you whether you believed she was telling the truth or not? Those are not hard questions for a criminal defense lawyer, but they are hard questions for me. (Susan Estrich)
  • Schools told to reinstate banned Cuba book. A federal judge Monday ordered the Miami-Dade County School District to restore a children's book about Cuba to school library shelves, delivering a blow to fiercely anti-Communist Cuban exiles who complained the book sugar-coats contemporary life in their homeland. "Vamos a Cuba," or "Let's Go to Cuba," had been pulled from elementary school libraries last month after Cuban-born parents and politicians denounced its depiction of life in the island nation ruled by Fidel Castro as misleading, propagandistic and a waste of taxpayers' money.
  • Workplace decision tests employees' ethics. Compensation expert Anne Ruddy likes to tell the story about the employee who missed a deadline to file for her company’s stock options. The woman, an assistant to the company’s chief executive, visited the human-resources office the morning after the deadline, apologized for being so busy that she overlooked the deadline, and then asked to file for the stock options. “What was the person in HR supposed to do?” Ruddy says. “Should she violate the law to accommodate this woman, although no one would probably ever know it? Or should she risk offending someone in the company who might be in a position of power?”
  • Wisconsin lawmakers want Islam teacher booted. After Kevin Barrett started talking about a class he planned to teach this fall on Islam, the little-known lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found himself in the middle of a fierce political battle between the school and state politicians. Barrett told a Milwaukee talk show host in June that he believed that the U.S. government used "controlled demolitions with explosives" on Sept. 11 to bring down the World Trade Center buildings and later said that the idea of a hijacked plane hitting the Pentagon was "preposterous." He plans to discuss these beliefs over one week of the 15-week course for undergraduate students. Wisconsin lawmakers, however, are trying to stop him.

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