Word: core
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sense, Jackson is now the beneficiary of all the prior efforts to derail his candidacy. The Southern regional primary that was at the core of Super Tuesday was designed to lay the groundwork for a moderate nominee who could carry Dixie. Instead, Jackson vaulted into contention by capturing roughly one-third of the Southern delegates. In the weeks before Michigan, Party Chairman Paul Kirk tried to grease the way for Dukakis by arguing that whoever was ahead when the primaries were over was entitled to the nomination, even if he was far short of the 2,082 delegates needed...
...years a debate has raged at Stanford University and reverberated through scores of other schools over a question that could set new directions for American higher education. The issue: Should students be required to read a fixed core of works on Western civilization, and, if so, what should be in it? The heart of the dispute at Stanford has been whether to amend or remove from the university's freshman Western culture courses a roster of 15 prescribed classics. Many scholars regard those works, ranging from Homer and Dante to Darwin and Freud, as part of a sacred canon...
...fear that just such a question was being raised, however, brought bellows of protest from academic conservatives like Education Secretary William Bennett. A devout classicist, he accused Stanford's revisionists of "academic intimidation," claiming that a "very vocal minority is attempting to overpower a less vocal majority." Dismantling the core curriculum, he warned, amounted to "trashing Plato and Shakespeare...
...hard-core revisionists are able to suit the word to the action. "We want the idea of a canon eliminated," insists William King, 21, chairman of Stanford's Black Student Union. "The idea that there could be a core list is Eurocentric and biased." Similar opinions are heard at other schools. At Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., Professor Arnold Krupat declares flatly that there is nothing sacred or broadly cultured about any such canon. In fact, he claims, the idea "is almost exclusively Wasp, male and East Coast...
...ideas are anathema to the likes of the University of Chicago's Allan Bloom, best-selling author of The Closing of the American Mind, who loudly deplores the blending of noble old wheat with trendy chaff. Stephen Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, criticizes the broadening of core lists as a form of "intellectual affirmative action" rather than a fresh infusion of literary blood. Balch complains that revisionists "have designed a project to alter the nature of civilization itself...