Word: core
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Even though the center of the earth is closer to New York City than New York is to Honolulu, it is as inaccessible to scientists as the stars. Until recently, the earth's core, hidden under thousands of miles of rock, was a mystery. Now all that is changing. In the past two years, thanks to a technological revolution in methods of observation, scientists have begun to paint a theoretical portrait of the planet's interior in startling detail. Says Harvard University Geophysicist Adam Dziewonski: "For the first time we can actually see the inside of the machine...
What they "see" is astounding. Far from being just a featureless sphere of molten iron, the core has a surface that is apparently studded with mountains and riddled with depressions that may be filled with lower-density fluid that forms the equivalent of oceans. There may even be a bizarre kind of rain: showers of iron particles that sprinkle down on the core. And all of this takes place in a region whose temperature is perhaps as hot as the surface...
What is deficient at Harvard is not the ideal but the implementation. Core courses are too large, while teaching often falls to graduate students largely ignorant of the Core's larger goals. As facts take the place of method, the ghost of Henry Adams snickers...
...Core thus needs to be rethought and further steeped in its own ideals. The faculty desperately needs to be enlarged so that more, smaller courses can be offered and undergraduates can be liberated from the menace of inept graduate students who have the potential to ruin otherwise fine courses fine courses and undermine even the most ideal curriculum...
...University elite towards students and society. The town itself was named the "Open University" to stand, in the words of one of its builders, "as an ideal toward which Harvard should strive." "Democracy--at Harvard and South Africa," he wrote in The Crimson at the time, "is at the core of the divestment struggle...