Word: foreign
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...right now is its drive to go international. It's a big enough priority that Omidyar has returned to his native France to help oversee the effort. eBay has always had a small percentage of overseas users logging into its U.S. site, but now it is aggressively moving into foreign markets. In June it purchased Alando.de--Germany's equivalent of eBay--and folded it into the eBay site. The company also has sites running for the U.K., Canada and Australia. eBay is far ahead in those countries but vulnerable in places where it is less well known--and where...
...half Soviet-style press censorship and half Desert Storm-style media management, the Russian command is totally controlling coverage. TV networks are not allowed to photograph Russian casualties and never show combat. When things go wrong, as they apparently did last week in Grozny, the official response to foreign reports is apoplectic. Accounts of the incident were, said General Alexander Zdanovich, spokesman for the internal security service, "active measures" concocted by Western intelligence services to discredit Russia...
Well, not everyone, and there's the rub. Americans, happy in their getting and spending, are largely oblivious to their massive world influence. But others are not, particularly foreign elites. Some chafe, like the French Minister of Culture who called Disneyland Paris a cultural Chernobyl. Some rant, like the Malaysian Prime Minister who rose at the U.N. in September to denounce "the true ugliness of Western capitalism...backed by the military might of capitalism's greatest proponent...
...real problem with Harvard's curriculum, though, is not that the Core is too foreign; rather, it is entirely too familiar. So many Core courses deal with the present or recent past--"The Warren Court" in Historical Studies B and "Industrial East Asia" in Foreign Cultures, for instance--that students are tempted to explore the cozy space within their current horizons rather than take a broadening course. Also, it seems that every ethnicity is recognized with at least one course, allowing students, in effect, to study the subject with which they are already (and quite inevitably) most familiar: themselves...
Which is fine, and maybe beneficial, so long as other courses are sufficiently foreign. Trouble is, several of the most promising courses seem determined to make attractively difficult material into familiar, almost banal, fare. Professor Michael Sandel's well-known and well-respected Core course concluded recently to a much deserved, if customary, standing ovation. "Justice," undoubtedly one of the best taught Cores, examines great philosophers and practical present-day applications of their theories, bringing daunting philosophies to bear on familiar contemporary debates...