To coach Mike Remillard, it was just another Tuesday evening game. The boy’s varsity basketball team at Leavitt Area High School in rural Leeds, Maine, was up against Mount Ararat, a tough rival from suburban Topsham. By halftime, his players needed motivating.

So Remillard descended into the graphic. Back in the locker room, he told them that this game “was about who had the biggest [male genitalia] in town.” Then, according to a statement later released by Leavitt principal Patrick Hartnett, he asked the players to reach into their shorts and “check their manhood” before heading back to the court for what ultimately would be a winning night as the season drew to a close late last month.

For Remillard, who says he draws his coaching philosophy from controversial hard-driving basketball legend Bobby Knight, those words were nothing more than “normal locker room banter.” For Hartnett, they were wholly out of bounds.

“I asked … if he thought that was an appropriate motivational tactic,” Hartnett told the school board after a conversation with Remillard. “He replied that ‘we won.’ It was at this point that I told him I could no longer support him as the coach of our team and relieved him of his duties without terminating his pay.”

Remillard agrees his tactic was inappropriate. But he claims he never said “we won.” Instead, he says, “What I told him was, ‘The tactic worked.’ We played like the young men that we were or could be — that’s what I said.”

Nevertheless, eight days after the incident, the board fired Remillard. By early February the Associated Press had carried the story, Fox TV and others news outlets had posted it on their websites, and Remillard’s career-ending move — less than a minute of provocative pep talk — had stirred a national buzz.

And for good reason. Focusing on sensual shock as a motivator debases human dignity. Suggesting that athleticism is solely masculine undermines the cause of gender equity in sports. Making raw sexuality the measure of competitive success is frankly dangerous, especially as educators struggle to address the issues of date rape by some young men proud of being macho, and of school shootings by others made to feel they’re not. And in an age hypersensitized by the Catholic Church’s tolerance of abusive priests, letting adults engage with boys in this way could raise fears of pedophilia. Did the school board have any alternative but to act decisively and swiftly?

Still, Remillard has his supporters. Was this, they ask, an offense worthy of termination, or could he have been reformed and retained? Was it, in other words, a firing or a lynching — a careful evaluation and review or an unexamined surge of revulsion? Was it an intolerable case of gutter-minded crassness or was this just Bobby Knight redux, where offensive habits are accepted for the sake of scoreboard success? Should the board have modeled a more judicious process to its students?

Whatever the answer, one thing is clear: The ethics of coaching goes well beyond the coaches themselves. It involves the entire community of students, parents, fans, administrators — and, most prominently, schools boards. What can boards do to prevent such sudden, grinding, and high-visibility ethical dilemmas? Former Maine commissioner of education Duke Albanese, co-author of the University of Maine’s well-regarded report on student athletics titled “Sports Done Right,” points to several things:

• Develop a consistent coaching philosophy. Boards need to articulate why interscholastic athletics matters, how it serves an educational purpose, and what values it teaches. Too often, he says, “coaches walk around with individual philosophies.” Rare is the school that brings coaches together in regular meetings to create the sense of “a coaching faculty.”
• Articulate sports policies that establish clear lines of authority. Some schools, Albanese says, have only a couple of lines on sports tucked into their policy manuals. When local booster clubs raise so much money that they’re funding entire teams — and seeking control over coaching decisions — boards can get cowed. If athletics is about education, the school must hold the reins firmly.
• Require eligibility standards for coaches. As schools increasingly rely on non-faculty coaches, Albanese worries they may be choosing individuals skillful at “the science of the game” but unprepared to be “mentor, guide, and teach.” “Sports Done Right” offers an online program to help certify coaches in these areas.
• Rethink job security. Unlike teachers, most coaches have only one-year contracts, yet they face increasing pressures from zealous parents demanding better positions or more playing time for their kids. While boards need freedom to remove bad apples, they also need to protect good ones — and coaches deserve greater consistency in matters of employment, supervising, and evaluation.

Bottom line? Coaching, like the rest of education, is about values. Even Mike Remillard admits he ran off the rails. But the fault may not be entirely his. Setting a climate of ethical clarity, and building policies to weed out the bad, reform the stumbling, and retain the promising, could avoid a lot of unfortunate press — and save a lot of potential Mike Remillards.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

“Their concern is that their strains have been used by several manufacturers to produce vaccines, and that Indonesia should get some compensation. From their point of view, it’s understandable.”

– Dr. David L. Heymann, chief of communicable diseases at the World Health Organization (WHO), commenting last week on Indonesia’s apparent decision to stop supplying the WHO with samples of the deadly avian flu virus. Indonesia’s move — which comes as the country brokers a deal to sell its samples to private vaccine maker Baxter Healthcare of Deerfield, Illinois — cuts off a vital supply of genetic information used to create yearly flu vaccines and prevent a much-feared possible pandemic.

Heymann and others note that poorer nations like Indonesia, “which has had more human cases of avian flu than any other country,” according to the Times, are tired of supplying samples used to make vaccines that they then cannot afford to buy.

The WHO said it will try to convince Indonesia to resume providing samples to the agency, perhaps in conjunction with a deal to build a vaccine manufacturing plant in Indonesia. Baxter Healthcare says the cut-off is Indonesia’s decision and not part of the company’s contract.

WASHINGTON
Tim Russert, the newsman who made his name as an aggressive interviewer for NBC, last week found himself on the receiving end of a grilling concerning his ethics and credibility when he was cross-examined in the perjury trial of former White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

Libby is charged with lying to a grand jury about the circumstances surrounding the leak of the name of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, allegedly as an act of revenge against her husband, a former ambassador who publicly criticized the Bush administration’s arguments for attacking Iraq.

Libby had told a grand jury that newspeople, including Russert, told him about the identity of Plame, not the other way around.

But Russert denied that claim during his testimony, the Baltimore Sun reports.

Under cross-examination, defense lawyers attacked Russert’s ethics, accusing him of having a personal bias against Libby and of misrepresenting various facts in the case, according to National Public Radio. Among other tactics, the defense played a tape of Russert’s appearance on a television program in which he appeared to delight in indictments pending against Libby.

The Associated Press reports that the defense also attempted to show that Russert had broken previous pledges of confidentiality to sources.

Russert was the prosecution’s last witness in the case. Defense witnesses could include vice president Dick Cheney and Libby himself, CNN reports.

The Libby case figuratively has put journalistic ethics on trial as well, with defense lawyers claiming that several high-profile reporters were careless and dishonest. Also, journalists and their organizations have protested that by coercing them to testify, the prosecution has turned reporters into de-facto agents of law enforcement, thus endangering the news profession because sources will be reluctant to speak to journalists anonymously about important issues because of fear that journalists will routinely be forced to divulge their identities.

BOSTON
What is described as the first major study of how physicians’ ethical and religious beliefs may affect patient care has revealed that many doctors do not feel obligated to tell patients about medical options that the doctors oppose on moral grounds.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago, found that 14 percent of physicians say they believe it is acceptable to withhold, on moral grounds, information on such topics as abortion, birth control, and sedating dying patients, the Reuters news agency reports.

The fact that a sizeable percentage of doctors feel no such obligation demonstrates that “there are a lot of physicians out there who are not, in fact, doing the right thing,” David Magnus, director of Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics, told the Associated Press.

The American Medical Association’s policies on the matter are vague, saying only that doctors are under no obligation to provide a treatment that is incompatible with their moral beliefs, but that the physician has an obligation to ensure that the patient as “access to adequate health care,” according to the AP.

The survey of 2,000 doctors, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, also showed 63 percent of respondents saying it would be ethical for morally conflicted doctors to “plainly” explain their objections to the patient, according to a report from CBS News and WebMD.

BEIJING
China’s battle against corruption took a more urgent turn last week as the government announced that there is an epidemic of fake or dangerous pharmaceuticals.

According to the New York Times, China has ordered a probe into the country’s fast-growing pharmaceutical industry, which has been plagued by suspicions that small Chinese drug manufacturers have been using substandard materials and practices to produce cheap counterfeit versions of standard drugs.

Scientific American reports that phony or hazardous drugs and health products have been blamed for many deaths in recent years, most notably in 2004 when 13 babies died of malnutrition after being fed counterfeit milk powder that had no nutritional value.

The English-language China Daily, an official government newspaper published in Beijing, reports that vice premier Wu Yi promised that 170,000 medicines will be reviewed.

Wu’s announcement, the Taiwan-based China Post reports, is seen as part of a major effort to reorganize the “disorderly” drug market in the wake of a scandal in which it was charged that the former head of the agency providing drug oversight took bribes to turn a blind eye to substandard drug producers.

CHARLOTTE, N.C.
The ethical uncertainties of Internet communication roiled the presidential campaign of former North Carolina senator John Edwards (D) last week, after the mainstream media disclosed cybertrails of incendiary statements by two staffers.

Edwards decided to keep the two on staff, but chastised them for the “intolerant language” used in their blogs, the Charlotte Observer reports.

The staffers, Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen, were hired by Edwards to oversee what he calls his “net roots” outreach, which the Washington Post describes as an effort to reach and harness the collective power of liberal bloggers.

Bloggers and other Internet communicators are becoming increasingly important in mobilizing public opinion but pose a hazard in the chaotic intersection of staid, play-it-safe presidential politics and the new media.

Before being hired by Edwards, both women maintained personal blogs on which they posted highly critical and sometimes profane statements about the Catholic Church, reports the Post.

According to a report from the New York Times, Edwards extracted public apologies from both staffers and made them promise to keep a more civil tone while they remained on his payroll.

But the move did not placate Bill Donohue, president of the 350,000-thousand member Catholic League.

“When Mel Gibson got drunk and made anti-Semitic remarks, he paid a price for doing so. When Michael Richards got angry and made racist remarks, he paid a price for doing so…. But John Edwards thinks the same rules don’t apply to him, which is why he has chosen to embrace foul-mouthed, anti-Catholic bigots on his payroll,” Donohue told Time magazine.

Late Monday, Marcotte posted a notice on her blog saying she had decided to resign from Edwards’ campaign. Marcotte said the incessant attacks from Donohue and others were “creating a situation where I felt that every time I coughed, I was risking the Edwards campaign,” reports the Associated Press.

LONDON
For the first time in U.K. history, an ethical investment fund has topped the performance charts.

The Co-operative Insurance Sustainable Lenders fund, which buys shares only in ethical and green companies, outperformed all other unit trusts, providing investors with a total return of more than 29 percent in the fiscal year ending January 31, 2007, according to the BBC.

Unit trusts, popular in the United Kingdom, are similar to mutual funds except that the holdings of the trust are fixed and management does not buy and sell shares during the time of the investment.

Fund manager Mike Fox told the Guardian that the performance of what are often called socially responsible funds demonstrates that they deserve to be taken seriously.

“With key drivers that seek to take advantage of growth in ethical consumerism, increased awareness of climate change and takeover interest in businesses that have captured a share of the eco-pound, socially responsible investments are well placed for further growth in the future,” he said.

But the official publication of the London Stock Exchange notes that socially responsible investment (SRI) funds still account for only 1 percent of assets managed through funds.

In related news, two major U.K. investment firms, HSBC Investments and Marks & Spencer Money last week launched a new ethical fund investing only in companies that make a “positive contribution” to communities or the environment.

According to a British investment counselors’ publication called InvestmentWeek.com, the fund will make it a point not to invest in companies involved in armaments, gambling, fur, pornography, or that make use of animal testing or child labor.

BRUSSELS
Adoption of a controversial plan to make pollution a crime enforced by the European Union is a “moral duty,” according to EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini.

The BBC reports that the plan to create a Europe-wide penal code for so-called green crimes faces widespread opposition by those who claim the European Commission, the regulatory arm of the EU, will usurp the right of national parliaments to make environmental law.

But Frattini maintains that the broader good of society transcends the individual concerns of the member states because they affect “the fundamental rights of citizens,” according to the Financial Times.

Reporting from Brussels, Financial Times correspondent George Parker notes that Frattini argued that criminals could exploit differences between member states on treatment of environmental crimes such as illegal dumping, shipment of waste, or picking wild flowers.

The proposed EU laws would impose five to ten years of jail time for green crimes that resulted in death or serious injury, the Reuters news agency reports. Companies also could be fined about $2 million for similarly serious offenses.

The draft legislation must be approved by member states and the European Parliament, reports the Budapest Business Journal.

If enacted, it would mark the first time that EU-wide mandated minimum sentencing, which already exists for terrorism and drug offenses, would apply to environmental crimes.

CHICAGO
A controversy over an ethics test heated up last week with the president of a university charging that officials administering the test, which several professors failed because they finished it too quickly, showed “an alarming lack of judgment and common sense” for flunking the test-takers.

“In my 28 years as a professor, I have never given a failing grade to a student for taking an exam too quickly,” Al Bowman, president of Illinois State University, wrote in a letter to the state’s executive inspector general, according to a report from the Chicago Tribune. “It is groundless and insulting to accuse employees of cheating simply because they finished the exam in less than 10 minutes.”

About 850 workers at three Illinois public-college campuses were told in November that the state inspector general had invalidated their completion of the mandatory course because they did not take enough time on the 80-screen computer presentation, according to the Tribune and the Associated Press.

According to the Daily Vidette, the student newspaper of the state-run Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, two professors who failed the test have joined with the local faculty association to file suit claiming the state did not inform test-takers of the time limit and had no right to impose such a restriction after the fact.

The training course and the concluding computer-generated test are mandated for all state employees.

According to a report from the Daily Illini, the student newspaper of the University of Illinois at Champaign, any state employee found “out of compliance” with the provisions of the annual training program could be fired.

One of the plaintiffs, math professor Marvin Zeman, says most of the answers were “common sense” and many were from the same material as presented in the previous year’s training course.

The state counters that test-takers were instructed to carefully read through the entire program and it would be physically impossible to complete the course in a few minutes.

MUNICH
Researchers have called for an ethical debate on a new technology uses brain scans to read a person’s intentions before they act.

The CBC reports that an international team of researchers last week published a study showing that through use of functional magnetic resonance imaging they could decode patterns in the brain that predicted future activity.

In the study, the researchers asked volunteers to think about whether they were going to add two numbers or subtract two numbers. By monitoring brain activity with a computer, the team was able to predict the volunteers’ intentions with about 70 percent accuracy, according to the computer trade journal IT Week.

According to a report from the Sydney Morning Herald, the team acknowledged that the work could carry troublesome moral implications, such as adopting brain scans for use in interrogations of criminal suspects or for predicting whether people are likely to commit crimes.

Study leader John-Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck Institute in Germany told the U.K. Guardian that “these techniques are emerging and we need an ethical debate about the implications, so that one day we’re not surprised and overwhelmed and caught on the wrong foot by what they can do.”

“These things are going to come to us in the next few years and we should really be prepared,” he said.

NEW YORK
A New York City cab driver last week returned 31 diamond rings left in a suitcase in his cab, even though his forgetful fare left him only a 30-cent tip.

“Why would I think I could keep it?” cab driver Osman Chowdhury asked Newsday. “It wasn’t mine.”

Chowdhury spent hours tracking the passenger down and returned the bag she had left in the trunk, according to the New York Daily News. The woman, a jeweler from Dallas, gave Chowdhury a $100 reward.

Chowdhury, who emigrated from Bangladesh, told television station WNBC that he grudgingly accepted the reward only to help make up for the fares he lost while he was tracking her down.

The head of New York City’s Taxi Workers Alliance said the city’s taxi drivers are “real heroes and heroines.”

“Whenever they find something in the backseat, drivers will immediately contact the person and return it to them,” Bhaivari Desai told the cable news channel New York 1.

It is not known how much the rings are worth.

In similar news, a Seattle-area cab driver recently returned a wallet containing nearly $6,000 in cash to a passenger who left the billfold in the backseat, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

“If money doesn’t belong to me, I don’t keep it,” cab driver Vinod Mago, who moved to the United States from India over 20 years ago, told the paper.

From the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and National Public Radio:

“A large majority of the American public thinks the country is more politically polarized than in the past, and an even greater number expresses a strong desire for political compromise. Fully three-quarters say they like political leaders who are willing to compromise, compared with 21% who see this as a negative trait. Moreover, a solid majority favors compromise when it comes to the most important issues of the day, even by the political party that they think most capable of handling these issues.

“And after an election in which voters in the middle of the electorate proved decisive, there are signs of the public’s continuing preference for political moderation. Majorities dislike political leaders who take liberal positions on nearly all issues (62%) as well as political leaders who take conservative positions on nearly all issues (57%)….

“Nonetheless, the public is skeptical about current prospects for increased bipartisanship in Washington. Few see signs that relations between Democrats and Republicans are getting better, and many themselves are hesitant to compromise on contentious political issues.

“The public’s taste for compromise and moderation is limited by several factors. First, while political leaders who are willing to compromise are viewed as appealing, so too are those who demonstrate political conviction. Two-thirds say they like politicians who stick to their positions, even if unpopular. There also is much greater support for compromise in principle than there is on contentious issues, such as the war in Iraq and abortion policy….

“In addition, the country’s lingering political bitterness complicates efforts at compromise, particularly between Democrats and President Bush. A majority of Democrats (54%) continue to say they want party leaders to ’stand up’ to President Bush, even if that means less gets done in Washington. By comparison, when the question is whether to compromise with Republicans rather than the president, Democrats express much greater willingness to find common ground….

“The survey finds that the war in Iraq is not only dominating the political landscape, it is overshadowing other major issues. When asked in an open-ended format to name the most important problem facing the country, 42% of the public volunteers the Iraq war. That nearly equals the highest percentage citing any single issue in a Pew Research Center trend dating back nearly two decades….

“The growing concerns about the war are underscored by the fact that the next most frequently named problems — the cost of health care and dissatisfaction with the government — were named by just 8% of respondents. Every other issue, from the economy to immigration to the budget deficit, ranked even further down the public’s list of leading concerns….

“Americans have long had a preference for political compromise, and this feeling has only increased over the past 20 years….

” Throughout this timespan, Democrats have consistently expressed more support for leaders who compromise than have Republicans, and this holds true today. Fully 87% of Democrats like leaders who are willing to make compromises in order to get the job done, compared with 70% of Republicans….

“Compared with a number of other leadership characteristics, willingness to compromise stands out as particularly appealing to Americans….

“The appeal of compromise is linked to a general distaste for ideologues….

“At root, the problem with questions of political compromise is that peoples’ answers will always be relative — compromise is fine when it is the other side that is doing the compromising. Fully 78% of Democrats believe that Republican leaders in Congress should work with Democratic leaders to accomplish things this year, but just 42% of Democrats say that their own leaders should be trying to work with President Bush. Similarly, 77% of Republicans think Democratic leaders should be making an effort to work with the president, but fewer (57%) think GOP leaders should reach across the aisle in order to get things done….

“Independents have different expectations for the two party’s leaders as well. Seven-in-ten independents say that the Republican leaders should try to work with Democratic leaders to get things done in Congress. A much slimmer majority of 54% place the same demands on Democratic leaders in terms of working with President Bush….”

“I have a lifetime contract. That means I can’t be fired during the third quarter if we are ahead and moving the ball.”

– Lou Holtz (Former NCAA football head coach, 1937 – )