Word: biased
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...standard dining hall grumble concerns the political bias of the course, and not without reason. Eckstein's lecture on Marx, for instance, focussed on two issues: how we know that Marx was wrong and why so many people nonetheless believe him. The performance was unfortunate for many students left Memorial Hall with no sense that an intelligent alternative might exist. That Otto Eckstein is no champion of alternative economic philosophies should come as no surprise; everyone knows that enrolling in Harvard to study Marx is like travelling to Brazil to practice speaking Spanish...
With its meritocratic bias, our industrial civilization has emphasized the acquisition of information; thus our exploitation of machines that increase either transmission or reception has always been remarkable. Americans hailed the early typewriter as the bringer of universal literacy and world peace; our predictions about telephones, radio, film and television have been similarly cosmic. American Utopias, as in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, gloried in a world linked by instantaneous communications; current proponents of cable television see this form as the solution to a remarkable medley of social ills...
Fussell's class bias is the only flaw in his otherwise brilliant analysis. And whether or not you believe that World War I has a unique and monolithic legacy for our way of seeing things, it has certainly reinforced certain modes of perception. War is one of the few experiences that whole cultures can share. In the past ten years, we all shared Vietnam by watching it on television. We saw it in a heap of bodies at Mylai, in the naked girl running down a road crying as napalm burned through her skin. But, as Fussell says, our culture...
...next morning I woke to read The New York Times, and was somewhat startled to find in bold-headlines--"U.S. Champion Accuses Judges of Bias--Ponders Retirement." Tom called at noon to say that since the night before had produced little sports news of national worth, our story had mushroomed to lead status throughout the country...
They also encourage students to be discerning and to recognize an author's bias. A spin-off of LAC-10, a reading-writing course, is also well attended. While TIME Correspondent Joseph Boyce sat in on a class last week, students were asked what came to mind when presented with each of several different adjectives meaning fat. Sample answers: for paunchy, "beerbelly"; corpulent, "overweight but dignified"; fleshy, "yuck, flabby"; burly, "a lumberjack or truck driver"; roly-poly, "funny, clownlike...