UC Berkeley Ethics Course Wonders if Trump’s Presidency is a Threat to Democracy
“discussing topics like lying, self-enrichment and the pros and cons of resignation and whistleblowing”
This is what Democrats want to make taxpayers fund so people can attend college for “free.”
Campus Reform reports:
Berkeley’s ‘Ethics in the Age of Trump’ course asks if Trump’s presidency is ‘threat to democracy’
The University of California, Berkeley offered a new course during the spring 2019 semester called “Ethics in the Age of Trump.”
Public policy professor David Kirp, who taught the course, said that the class was not about “Trump-bashing,” but instead explored the “ethical implications of Trump-ism” by “discussing topics like lying, self-enrichment and the pros and cons of resignation and whistleblowing,” according to a piece the professor wrote for The Washington Post.
“I fantasized that I’d start by announcing, dead pan, that this was a very short course because the topic was a nonstarter — there was no ethics in the Trump world — and that everyone who left a red envelope filled with cash on the podium would receive an A,” stated Kirp, regarding the first day of class. “Then I would walk out of the room, returning a minute or two later to bedlam. ‘Just kidding,’ I’d say, and we would settle down to business.”
Kirp’s course seeks to explore various discussion questions, including “How had the president’s words and deeds affected the way that issues like racism were understood?” “What were the impact of Trump’s assaults on the press?” and “whether Donald Trump’s presidency could represent a threat to democracy itself.”
“Mostly, the students dismissed the threat-to-democracy argument, believing that Trump, despite his authoritarian tendencies and disrespect for the Constitution, lacked the brainpower to pull off that transformation,” Kirp said about the last example question.
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Comments
I hope it is a threat to DEMOCRACY. We are a REPUBLIC and there is a difference.
Obviously a sophmore course.
Tell hysterical lies, get a nice paycheck.
And some people actually wonder why academia doesn’t get the respect it used to.
Memo for David Kirp: if Trump’s presidency was really a ‘threat to democracy’ you’d already be inside looking out through electrified barbed wire.
What an idiot.
The course is about lying, self-enrichment and the pros and cons of whistleblowing and resignation, but it’s “not about Trump bashing.”
Some self-awareness on the part of Mr. Kirp would be good, not to mention a little intellectual honesty.
Intellectual honesty f rom a Berkeley professor–you have to be joking.
Trump was already rich before he ran for president. Now if you want a few examples of using their offices to enrich themselves, you could start with the Clintons and continue through pretty much anybody in Congress.
It is. We are a republic.