Word: fermentation
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...multicultural crusade has become part of a wider ferment on American campuses that includes the efforts to mandate a greater "diversity" within faculty and student bodies as well as the movement, derisively labeled "political correctness," that seeks to suppress thoughts or statements deemed offensive to women, blacks or other groups. Some of this has provoked flare-ups, notably at Stanford University, which in 1988 decided to revamp its first-year course, Western Culture, in response to critical pressure. Some students and faculty members at the elite, ethnically diverse institution had complained that the course syllabus offered only the writings...
...want to sound apocalyptic about these developments. Education is always in ferment, and a good thing too. The situation in our universities, I ; am confident, will soon right itself. But the impact of separatist pressures on our public schools is more troubling. If a Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to use the schools to disable and handicap black Americans, he could hardly come up with anything more effective than the "Afrocentric" curriculum. And if separatist tendencies go unchecked, the result can only be the fragmentation, resegregation and tribalization of American life...
...chief political casualties from the week's ferment were Yugoslavia's two senior Serbs. On Friday, Borisav Jovic, the Serbian leader of Yugoslavia's eight-man presidency, resigned after a majority of his colleagues from the country's five other republics rejected an army proposal to declare a national state of emergency. The next day, two more presidency members who supported Jovic followed suit. Voicing fears that the country was headed inexorably toward civil war, Jovic said he was "not ready to go along with such decisions that are leading to the breakup of the country." For his part, Serbian...
Religious ferment is bound to continue, along with the other changes reshaping the U.S.S.R. But it is uncertain whether the emerging society will be, in the phrase of 19th century writer Nikolai Leskov, "baptized but not enlightened" -- formally religious but narrowly sectarian in outlook. The odds on enlightenment have been lengthened greatly, however, by the ability of the country's deeply spiritual people to embrace and expand their beliefs in public...
...communist rule have obliterated the ethnic passions that made the Balkans a synonym for fractious politics. Now, with the communist world crumbling, new instability may follow the glum quiet of the Pax Sovietica. The peril exists side by side with the opportunity for healthy change, but the current political ferment of Eastern Europe is an inherently volatile mix in which old demons -- belligerent nationalism and demagogic populism -- could win out as easily as liberal democracy...