Baron cancels sleepover; ethically justified maimings dispensed via handheld keypads

Today's 21st century marketing lecture was meant to be devoid of Steve Duke. It wasn't.

Perhaps the thought of skipping the ethics lecture to jet off to one-time guest-speaker Ed Baron's Key West abode struck Duke as a tad too ironic. From the confusion pervading the ensuing PowerPoint slides, ("real truth may not come from juxtaposing extremes; it may come in a gray area in between") we're betting it was just a bad breakup.

Didn't slow down Friday's lecture, though. The keypad clickers employed by ASG for voting and tested on Medill freshmen a few weeks ago were back for an ethics questionnaire culminating in a scintillating ethical dilemma. A bargain-bin video posed freshmen-cum-train-conductors an impossible choice: mow down five immobilized invalids on the tracks or flip a magic switch, derail the train, and avert their deaths but kill another innocent bystander waiting at the platform.

And the students vote to maim! Fully 66% (come to think of it, a suspect portion) of respondents said Fuck the invalids. Apparently the prevailing logic was that these people were on the tracks and should therefore die instead of the poor woman waiting at the platform. It evidently escaped freshmen that the five people on the tracks were undoubtedly unable to move for some reason -- perhaps tied to the tracks or deaf -- and just as innocent as the latte-sipping woman awaiting the next train. And, on that note, why is the train unable to stop if people are waiting for it at a nearby platform? Wouldn't it be stopping? Here's to the hope that Duke posts the video on YouTube for public perusal. Who knows -- it may just turn up on the final.