The environment both natural and artificial shapes us.

I write about business ethics and I am deeply concerned about our current students in colleges and universities across the United States. Right now they are witnessing the highest and most powerful people in the United States government behaving in often illegal and continuously unethical ways. I am pointing specifically at the Cabinet members of the current administration although they are not the only ones.

They were selected on the basis of the most craven, servile loyalty and very often without any actual qualifications for their positions. And we see often on a daily basis, that to keep these jobs they must over and over again express their fealty to the current leadership. It is a degrading spectacle. Humans were meant to walk upright like free men and women not like some kind of whipped dog.

So, the current students here in this country witness a group of people getting ahead by sacrificing their honor, their self-respect, and abdicating their obedience and oath to the Constitution and laws of the United States. These people appear on television. They get good salaries and excellent benefits. There is an implication of after office service in think tanks and foundations at even more money. (However, the future of those from this openly corrupt administration is in some doubt.) Their lives are clear evidence that giving up your principles and abject loyalty to the most monstrous of individuals can be a successful strategy, if money and position are your only goals.

We do not live purely for money and position. I believe that is a truth. However, when I was teaching my students often told me that would seek a high paying position and do that job for twenty some years and then retire and live the life they wanted. I tried to explain to them that twenty years at a degrading and morally corrupt job would change them permanently, not to mention that a long life is not something that can be depended on. I am not sure they listened. After all, the lure of the opposite sex, nice cars, social position and economic security are very persuasive.

Explaining that a life you can look back on with pride is the only one worth living is difficult when your students are so young and want so many things so badly. And that is why we who teach are under a special and vital responsibility to point out the flaws in the “success at any personal cost” model.

We must be inspirational leaders not just teachers. We will have failed in a substantial and historically significant way if the current generation learns as a life lesson that servility and dishonor are proven paths to success. How will we be able to enjoy our retirements and our latter years when we see our students entering middle age in jobs they hate and despise because we were unable to communicate the important of moral and socially responsible conduct? And what of our nation? Can you imagine an entire generation admiring the antics of Pete Hegseth or Pam Bondi or any other of the cast of this ongoing federal reality show, a form of Wrestlemania writ large across our civic landscape?

If there was a time in your life to stand up for the values of the United States of America, this is it.

If you value your students’ futures, you must act to influence them to act in the interests of their nation, their posterity and their honor.

If not now, then when?

There is no convenient time to take a stand against evil.

Act now.

Your students and your nation are worth fighting for.

James Alan Pilant