Yale Vipers

Even though it is sometimes difficult to "read between the lines" to assess whether or not people in an organization are welcoming or tacitly "showing you the door," the message is undoubtable and even palpable when "all the arrows are pointing in the same direction." In the case of Yale, where I have been an alumni scholar temporarily in residence during the 2023-2024 year, the university's administration could do its alumni a big favor by explicitly saying that we are not welcome back on campus, except to visit and of course donate money. Instead, passive aggression, unaccountability, and even unwarranted retaliation rule the roust there, in what is a toxic organizational culture. 

The full essay is at "Yale Vipers."

Murdoch in Europe: Newsprint Wielded as a Personal Political Weapon

Testifying in Europe on June 11, 2012 about the influence of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers—and thus Murdoch himself—over the state government of Britain, Gordon Brown accused The Sun of having undermined the state’s contribution to the war in Afghanistan. The newspaper caused “huge damage to the war effort,” he said, by suggesting that Brown’s administration “didn’t care about our troops.” The coverage was oriented, Brown contended, to his supposed lack of care about the troops rather than to what the troops were doing in Afghanistan.

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, which is available at Amazon.

FIFA: Weaving an Unethical Web in a Sport

Soccer is the world’s most popular sport. Unfortunately, the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the international association of soccer, has “repeatedly faced charges of corruption while operating with a lack of transparency and little oversight.”[1] Even though corruption comes naturally to individuals, institutional processes and structure too can be unethical in themselves. In such cases, it is not sufficient to isolate and remove the sordid persons; structural reform is needed too.

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business: A Malignant Mentality of Mendacity, available at Amazon.

1. Jeré Longman, “Accusations Are Replaced by Anger at FIFA,” The New York Times, May 30, 2011.