Word: context
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...staff rightly critiques Mansfield's detractors but fails to discuss the full context for their protest. Mansfield's claim that affirmative action is undermining Harvard's commitment to academic excellence is patently absurd. By a variety of indicators, from rising admissions standards to the recruitment of acclaimed faculty, Harvard's academic brilliance seems to be intensifying, not decreasing...
...protesters were certainly entitled to their right to demonstrate and distribute fliers outside of Harvard Hall. But we must question the effectiveness of and motivation for this protest. In our academic environment, shouldn't those who disagree with Mansfield challenge him in an intellectual context? The protesters have the right to see Mansfield in his office hours, or to ask him to meet for a public debate. Mansfield has never been shy about publicly advocating his opinions. Last year, he even agreed to rebut the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson's speech about affirmative action at the Institute of Politics. Following...
...year the smorgasbord from Iowa to California groaned under all the offerings: flattening the tax structure, abolishing free-trade agreements, limiting the terms of lawmakers, reinventing welfare or health care or public housing or farm subsidies, spending more on defense, cutting this agency or that, restricting immigration. In this context voters could come to believe that those they elected would determine what kind of country they would live...
...symbolic, petit-mal rebellion, negligible in the context of the 1960s. (Or the '90s: writer Pat Jordan once described Franklin as "a nice man dressing to look bad.") But in the moral universe of serious Evangelicalism, it signified something more troubling: a distance from God, or worse, a willful turning away from his face. That is certainly how Franklin understood it. "I prayed and attended church," he says. "But I found the things in the world pleasurable and fun, and I didn't like being around Christian people." He had come to identify full Christian commitment with hated authority...
...development, Rudenstine's argument that current affirmative-action policies are compatible extensions of the diversity held in mind by past Harvard presidents is unconvincing. Both men viewed diversity primarily in terms of geographic origins and intellectual passions, not race. Rudenstine spends more than half his report outlining the historical context of diversity. While paying lip service to the often unjust ways in which Harvard has treated its "other" students--blacks, southern European immigrants, Jews, women--Rudenstine largely omits mention of these unadmirable accomplishments. Four omissions...