Expelled for... um... Greenface?

Back in the halcyon days of the 2010s, the big annual event of this blog was the Curmie Awards, presented to the person or organization who most embarrassed the profession of education.  Curmie would compile a list of nominees from stories he’d covered during the calendar year, and readers would vote on the most (un)deserving recipient.

There won’t be any Curmies awarded this year or in the foreseeable future for three reasons.  First, Curmie has written a lot less of late about educators behaving badly.  That doesn’t mean there haven’t been cases, of course, but, perhaps because he’s no longer in the game, as it were, other stories have done more to pique his interest.  Plus, the unethical or incompetent protagonists in most of the education-related stories Curmie has covered recently have been non-educators: students, politicians, or organizations like the NCAA.

Second, blogspot no longer supports the gadget that allowed polls, so there would have to be a link to an outside site like Survey Monkey or something, and Curmie doesn’t want to deal with all that noise.

Finally, there are a lot fewer of you.  Individual posts are garnering only 20% or so as many hits as in yesteryear.  You, Gentle Reader, are a member of an elite, not to say miniscule, group.  It doesn’t make sense to continue the poll if a half dozen votes would win the election.

All that said, Curmie’s netpal Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms alerted him to a story that, if Curmies were still a thing, would mean that what passes for a brain trust at St. Francis High School in Mountain View, CA, like Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando’s character in “On the Waterfront”), coulda been a contender.

Our story begins in 2017, when three 14-year-old boys took a photo of themselves posing with anti-acne masks covering their faces.  One of the three apparently had rather severe acne, and the other two joined him in what Reason’s Jacob Sullum describes as “an act of playful solidarity.”  The medication started light green in color, but grew darker as it dried.  The lads photographed themselves because they “looked silly.”  Importantly, the boys did not post the photo to social media.

Nothing to see here, right?  Well, not to any rational person, no.  But this is a story about high school administrators, remember?  Two of those lads were about to enroll at St. Francis, a high-priced private school.  Again: so far, so good.

Flash forward three years.  It’s now 2020 and the aftermath of the George Floyd incident in Minnesota.  Some recent St. Francis grads had posted an apparently not-PC meme about Floyd’s death, so there was, perhaps, some increased tension.  Unbeknownst to the two boys attending St. Francis, the other lad in the photo had sent a copy to a friend, who “tagged a music playlist on her Spotify account with a copy of the photograph.”  And one of her friends (the administrators undoubtedly know who, but that information seems not to be available to the rest of us) saw it there, recognized the boys, and proclaimed them to be in blackface.  The photo was to be regarded as “another example” of racism at St. Francis.

Well, no self-respecting (i.e., self-important) school administrator wants that kind of publicity, so instead of…you know… listening to the mother of one of the boys, who explained the truth of the matter, they decided that due process was far too much to ask, so they summarily issued an ultimatum that the boys either withdraw or be expelled.

To be fair, those masks are pretty dark (see the photo above), and it’s not too outrageous a leap of faith to see them as blackface, especially if you’ve been prompted to do so.  So some of the furor, though not justified, was at least comprehensible.  But that doesn’t get the school off the hook.  They leapt to a false conclusion when even a cursory glance at the so-called evidence would have revealed that the boys did nothing wrong.  (Curmie isn’t convinced that what 14-year-olds do ought to be held against them years later even if they were in blackface, but that’s at least an arguable position.)

As Curmie has noted several times in the past, it’s important to get names out there if possible.  We may not know the name of the student who posted that photo, but we do know that President Jason Curtis immediately piled on without bothering to check the facts, and that Dean of Students Ray Hisatake called the boys’ parents but obviously didn’t care that they offered a reasonable and indeed true rebuttal to the accusations leveled against their sons.

The money quote, though, is that of Principal Katie Teekell, who said her decision was based not on the boys’ “intent,” but on “optics” and “the harm done to the St. Francis community.”  Of course, there is no indication that the student whose posting of the photo was obviously intended to demean the school has suffered any punishment at all.  Meanwhile the boys who did nothing wrong, and weren’t yet students at the school when the supposedly offending photo was taken, were almost literally run out of town.  The world knows that, now.  So, Ms. Teekell, as Matt Damon might have said in “Good Will Hunting,” “how do you like them optics?” 

This being an education story, and Curmie being a career educator, it seems only appropriate that we attempt to discern the explanation for the administrators’ actions with a multiple-choice quiz.

So…

They acted the way they did because…

a.    They have been so infected with a socio-political agenda that they are incapable of seeing the world except through woke-colored glasses.

b.  They have the ethical sensibility of a hungry cobra and the backbone of overcooked angel’s hair.

c.     They’d come in third place in a battle of wits with a dead battery and a turnip.

Yes, I know, Gentle Reader, “d. all of the above” is likely the best answer, but perhaps your mileage may vary.

This story has received new life of late because the boys sued the school and the jury recently awarded them over a million dollars.  The award is based on a new California law which demands the equivalent of due process from organizations like private schools, unions, hospitals, etc.  This is the first case to invoke the new law in a suit against a private secondary school.

The initial suit sought over twenty million dollars in damages, but the jury rejected claims of breach of contract, defamation, and violation of free speech.  Curmie reminds you, Gentle Reader, that he is not a lawyer, but he confesses astonishment that falsely labeling Bay Area teenagers (OK, they’re into their 20s now) as racists doesn’t qualify as defamation.  Still, each boy will receive over a half million dollars, and the school might have learned its lesson.

Yeah, that’s likely to happen…

 

 

The Sauer/Trump Hail Mary Pass

John Sauer addresses the court.

One of the most common devices of Trump apologists is to cite some rumor or innuendo about a prominent Democrat and sneeringly remark “but sure, it’s Donald Trump who’s an existential threat to democracy.”  Curmie’s response is simple: show some actual evidence that Joe Biden (or whoever) has committed actual crimes and Curmie will cheerfully see them prosecuted and, if appropriate, convicted.  Whataboutism is an admission of guilt.

The fact that there are corrupt Democrats doesn’t make Trump any less of a menace, and Curmie would be hard-pressed to find any Democrat as petulant, vindictive, narcissistic, authoritarian, mendacious, hypocritical, or, frankly, unhinged (certainly not all at once), as The Donald.  These traits aren’t crimes, necessarily, but they’re sure as hell reason not to want him as President.

Curmie has known all this about Trump for years, and you probably have, too, Gentle Reader, as this page doesn’t attract a lot of idiots.  We need only look at the ongoing slanders against the Central Park Five even after DNA proved their innocence, at the absurd insistence that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, at that “grab ‘em by the pussy” line.  Racist?  Undoubtedly.  Sexist?  You bet.  Corrupt?  You have to ask?

All that said, there was a reasonable unease surrounding his criminal prosecutions.  They certainly could have been characterized as an attempt by Democrats (specifically Joe Biden?) to weaken a political opponent.  Notice, Gentle Reader, that the previous two sentences are in the past tense.  That’s because this week happened.

You’ve probably heard all about this incident already, Gentle Reader, and Curmie is far from the first to comment, but some ideas bear repeating.  This Tuesday, Trump lawyer John Sauer went on the record—with Trump by his side—arguing that Presidents or ex-Presidents could not be prosecuted for such crimes as selling pardons or even ordering SEAL Team Six to assassinate political rivals, provided only that they had not been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate.  Trump himself appears to have endorsed his lawyer’s argument later this week.

Curmie isn’t going to bother to include a zillion links, many including audio recordings, of the courtroom proceedings—you can use the Google machine as well as Curmie can—but he does recommend Jacob Sullum’s article on Reason .

Needless to say, Judge Florence Pan eviscerated Sauer’s argument, and James Pearce, assistant to special counsel Jack Smith, piled on.  Pan pointed out that “Your separation of powers argument falls away, your policy arguments fall away if you concede that a president can be criminally prosecuted under some circumstances.”  Pearce pointed out that under Sauer’s reasoning a President could commit such an illegal act and then resign before he could be impeached, thereby literally getting away with murder.  (Please note that there will come a time when the President is a “she” or perhaps even a “they” rather than a “he.”  Please accept the masculine pronoun for convenience sake in the short term, at least, as it describes the current President and all of his predecessors.)

Sauer, not the brightest light in the marquee (seriously, what lawyer with any brains or integrity would make such an inane argument, and what competent judge, irrespective of political persuasion, would accept it?), then made things worse by arguing that such a scenario would be preferable to the possibility of a politically motivated prosecution. 

You read that correctly, Gentle Reader: politically motivated murder is not as bad as an arguably politically motivated prosecution which, of course, wouldn’t lead to a conviction except in the absence of reasonable doubt in the mind of even a single juror. 

Sauer also omits, presumably intentionally unless he’s an actual idiot as opposed to just not being very bright, the fact that such crimes could be perpetrated, or the President’s culpability discovered, late enough that an impeachment could not occur while that President was still in office.  (The Senate vote on Trump’s second impeachment came after he was out of office, and Mitch McConnell, among others, argued that one reason for acquittal was that Trump was no longer President and could still be tried for any criminal acts committed while in office.  The impeachment by the House, however, happened while Trump was still President.)

It also appears that Sauer is arguing that even if a President were to be impeached and convicted of, say, selling pardons, he couldn’t subsequently be prosecuted for… oh… giving nuclear secrets to Vladimir Putin, or in fact calling out SEAL Team Six to whack a political rival.  If the Constitution really does say any of this stuff, then it's time to throw the thing out and start over.  But, of course, it doesn’t.

But there’s a layer of outright stupidity here that has barely been plumbed.  Donald Trump is making it increasingly clear that if he ever enters the White House again except as a tourist, and if his immunity argument is regarded as reasonable, then he not only could, but will, use that power to enrich himself and sound the death knell for the nation as we know it.

But, you see, if a President can do anything he wants in his official capacity, up to and including ordering the murder of political rivals… well, Joe Biden is President now, and there’s this annoying loud-mouthed demagogue who threatens not merely Biden’s political future, but the entire nation’s freedom.  And SEAL Team Six is only a phone call away.

What Sauer is hoping for, of course, is a delay.  He believes that the longer the court takes to tell him to take a long walk on a short pier, the better it is for his client.  Significantly, however, this strategy is a good one only if Trump really is guilty.  Curmie, who despises Donald Trump with every fiber of his being, doesn’t know enough about the specific laws and the specific charges faced by the former President to declare him guilty of crimes.  That said, if Trump is really innocent, he’d want the trial to happen quickly, get an acquittal, and then bellow even louder that Biden is exacting vengeance on a political rival.  Instead, the defense team implicitly grants that Trump’s actions were illegal, but argues that he ought to have been able to get away with them.

It is not a news flash that Donald Trump is both dangerous and stupid.  Sauer’s argument is, too.  It is so palpably ridiculous that it could only be a desperation move: a Hail Mary pass, as it were.  You don’t throw a Hail Mary if you can win the game by taking a knee.  Sauer’s stratagem is therefore not merely desperate in its own right, but also a pointer to a larger desperation.  He knows the relevant statutes and the evidence far better than you or I, Gentle Reader, and he clearly believes that if the case were actually to go to trial, a conviction is more likely than not.

Here’s hoping the prison will allow The Donald to dye his toupée so the color doesn’t clash with his orange jumpsuit.  A refusal of such a request would be far closer to cruel and unusual punishment than holding him accountable for his own actions will ever be.