Word: civic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...face, the IOP purports to support exactly what the misty-eyed memoirists of the activist Sixties want Harvard students to be doing. In the style of the civic-minded academy, it implores Harvard students to “examine critically and think creatively about politics and public issues.” The entire circus operates under the spiritual aegis of President John F. Kennedy ’40, who, one imagines, looks down with rolled-up sleeves and a winning smile upon the IOP’s noble young activists...
...having a corral for the political set on JFK street means Harvard mirrors a problem endemic to the nation: the consigning of civic duties to a self-contained class of “political people.” This flies in the face of the very notion of democratic society: that we are all political people. Political mobility is a sentiment which needs to boil through everyone who comes to Harvard College, a trade school of citizenship...
Active administrative intervention as an effective means of cultivating “civic courage” and “views contrary to those of established forces” seems not merely impractical, but almost absurd. The activism of the 1960s was resolute in its antagonism toward institutions and administrators; faculty meetings and procedural resolutions hardly seem the crucible for this specific brand of advocacy. Yet those that were the targets of student activism are now supposed to study and stoke it. This is not only ironic but impractical—a University’s job is to educate...
...Cassandras of ’67 miss the mark. It’s not that Harvard is letting in the wrong people, or that “undergraduate life at the College today is not giving due encouragement to civic courage and political engagement,” as our ornery alumni suggest. Though they’ve asked Faust to charter a task force with a name so long and grammatically complex that it cannot possibly be anything but a good idea, no amount of administrative prodding will wake us up to the fact that, as they claim...
...their privacy. “With the nature of Facebook, privacy is a fine line,” said Jeffrey J. Lee ’11. “But some things need to be limited, like the shopping thing,” Adam Green, a spokesman for MoveOn.org Civic Action, the political group that created the petition, said in an e-mailed statement that “Facebook’s policy change was a huge step in the right direction, and we hope it sets an important precedent in favor of Internet users’ rights that...