Word: direness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Second, we are told that the University is in dire financial straits and its existence is threatened unless it can engage in such profitable enterprises. Unfortunately, very few of us are privy to the secrets of the University's finances and exactly how it spends its money. As a former budget-making officer of a major university, I know that published budgets are policy documents, not objective balance sheets. "Creative cost accounting" in an institution like a university makes it possible to reallocate charges among its units to help make the case for almost anything. Claims that the University...
More important, suppose the University were really in dire financial distress. The suggestion that we save it financially by destroying its institutional nature is rather like the way Indochinese villages were "saved from Communism" by being bombed into oblivion. Come to think of it, that, too, was a policy purused by former Harvard administrators and professors, so perhaps we should not be surprised...
Despite such dire-and wildly overstated-warnings, a recalcitrant Congress last week still postponed the hard decisions on budgets, taxes and deficits until after the elections. Congress did manage, before it adjourned, to pass a "continuing resolution" that will allow the Government to keep operating until Dec. 15, and remove all doubt that those Social Security checks will be cashed. But Congress will have to come back on Nov. 12, for its first postelection session in a presidential-election year since 1948, to have another go at deciding how much the Government can really spend and how big a deficit...
...crude deliveries through Iraq's pipelines to the Mediterranean. Between them, the two nations export just over 3 million bbl. per day, around 20% of gulf crude shipments, an amount that would not necessarily be critical at a time of a global oil glut. But there was the dire possibility that the Strait of Hormuz, 30 miles wide at its narrowest point, at the southern end of the gulf, might be closed because of the hostilities. Halting the flow of the supertankers that steam through the passage would have a devastating ripple effect (see following story) by preventing...
Economically, the new regime has concocted a potpourri of socialism and private enterprise, a program dictated less by ideology than dire need. When they took over last year, the Sandinistas inherited a $1.5 billion national debt, $1.3 billion in war damages and an impoverished, largely peasant population. The government launched a number of ambitious reforms, from a sweeping agrarian redistribution and nationalization of banks to a literacy campaign that has already taught some 600,000 people to read and reduced the country's illiteracy rate from 50% to about...