Word: downplay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Harvard's tenure review system and others like them is to shield professors and administrators from situations in which their private interests or the interests that attach to their offices might distort their judgment. In this context it is curious to hear the associate provost of Harvard University downplay the reach and significance of his administrative position. It is odd to witness the director of the Program in Ethics and the Professions depreciate the importance of fundamental norms of fair process. And it is false and insulting for Prof. Thompson to suggest that asking Harvard to respect its own procedures...
Yesterday, Donnan made a thoroughly unconvincing effort to downplay his feud with Fulmer...
...tried to downplay our nationalaffiliation," he says. "We think we're unique, Iguess, like everyone else at Harvard...
Life offers such a grim plenitude of fatal accidents, of deaths visited on the undeserving without discernible pattern or purpose, that serious fiction, as opposed to mysteries and thrillers, tends to shun or downplay such events. Writers and readers alike expect stories to make sense, after all, and random tragedies simply don't. So author William Trevor takes something of a risk when he opens his latest novel, Death in Summer (Viking; 214 pages; $23.95), with a woman riding a bicycle along an English country lane being hit and killed...
Though the cash windfall was nice, both authors downplay the sudden change in their fortunes. Lamb and his wife, a high school teacher, are giving a lot of their newfound wealth away, while Mitchard was relieved merely to be able to pay some bills. Oprah has copies of their new books, but Lamb and Mitchard say they have no expectations that the star will pick them again. And it hardly matters. According to Pamela Dorman, Mitchard's editor, the author already has such an enthusiastic following that Viking has printed 400,000 copies of the new title. "Of course there...