Word: commit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study—the what?—the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers have jeopardized our collective future.There is, however, an alternative, whose viability has become blissfully clear in the past week. Blessed with insight, experience, and a steadfast commitment to efficiency and democratic governance, Harvard’s administrative messiah comes replete with the self-confidence of Lawrence H. Summers, the verbosity of Derek C. Bok, and the grace-under-fire of Nathan M. Pusey ’28.Drew G. Faust should use this afternoon’s installation ceremony...
Today we mark new beginnings by gathering in solidarity; we celebrate our community and its creativity; we commit ourselves to Harvard and all it represents in a new chapter of its distinguished history. Like a congregation at a wedding, you signify by your presence a pledge of support for this marriage of a new president to a venerable institution. As our colleagues in anthropology understand so well, rituals have meanings and purposes; they are intended to arouse emotions and channel intentions. In ritual, as the poet Thomas Lynch has written, “We act out things we cannot...
...verities of Puritan religion. We understand it quite differently now. Truth is an aspiration, not a possession. Yet in this we—and all universities defined by the spirit of debate and free inquiry—challenge and even threaten those who would embrace unquestioned certainties. We must commit ourselves to the uncomfortable position of doubt, to the humility of always believing there is more to know, more to teach, more to understand...
Although both feminism and Communism have laid claim to Lessing, she avoids being identified with movements or ideologies, political or literary. She refuses to settle for simple answers or received wisdom, and she has never been afraid to commit heresy. In the 1970s she began experimenting with science fiction - it is unlikely that any other Nobel laureate could lay claim to a work like her 1994 novel The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, about an eco-catastrophe on a distant world. In August Lessing published a new novel, The Cleft, in which she re-imagines the history...
...fire for failing to tackle South Africa's raging violent crime. But there was even more heat over his friendship with Glen Agliotti, a man suspected by South African police of being a crime boss, and who was arrested by the Scorpions and charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the 2005 killing of mining magnate Brett Kebble. (Agliotti's lawyers told a bail hearing that Kebble's death was an "assisted suicide...