Cancel Culture at Work Again It appears the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education (SFUSD) has plenty of time to vote on changing the names of schools but not enough to ensure that the districts’ schools can open safely. Rather than spend time figuring out the best (safest)... Read more →

Creating an Effective E-Learning Environment Imagine if the pandemic had hit five years ago. We would not have been able to switch to an online course structure with no live interaction. That would have been a true disaster. It’s hard enough to engage students in the learning experience, but since... Read more →

The Role of Cognitive Dissonance Have you ever wondered why people you know who seem to be paragons of virtue sometimes deviate from ethical norms and do the wrong thing? Just about everybody knows such a person. But, what causes them to act that way in a particular situation? I... Read more →

The Failure to Establish an Ethical Culture The culture of an organization sets the tone whether it fosters ethical behavior or something else. In ethics, we say the “tone at the top” establishes the basis for an ethical culture. In the case of former LSU football standout, Derrius Guice, the... Read more →

My Ethical Dilemma I have previously blogged about whether we should expect ethics professors to be ethical. In reading up on this issue, I found an interesting study on why ethics professors don’t behave better. The results made me worry about what might be happening to ethicists and whether they... Read more →

Analyzing Motives for Behavior What motivates a parent to bribe key people to get their kid admitted to a prestigious university? That is the ethical question of “Operation Varsity Blues.” In March 2019, the story broke of an alarming fraudulent scheme by parents to pay off middleman, William “Rick” Singer,... Read more →

What College Students Should Know Everyone is caught up in the coronavirus outbreak whether as a health professional, government official, owner/CEO of a business and its employees, or average citizen. Many ethical issues exist about the way we have handled the crisis. Personal responsibility is important as is how we... Read more →

Explosion of “Support Services” Breaks the Budget We hear it all the time during the Democratic debates. College tuition is too high; students are burdened with overwhelming debt; and state support is lacking. This is all true. Having taught at the university level for about 40 years, I’ve come to... Read more →

PISA Assessment Scores are Troubling The results of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) are in and it is bad news for the U.S. U.S. teenagers still lag much of the rest of the developed world in scores covering math, reading and science. Moreover, there is a widening gap... Read more →

Online Shaming: Good or Bad? A great deal has been said and written about the existence of a “cancel culture.” The cancel culture is mainly an Internet phenomenon where those offended by the comments of another party become denounced online by those who object to the behavior. It’s a cultural... Read more →