Word: formulaic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...such voluntary measures perhaps formal ones are needed. It follows also from the ethics of the tenure system that those with working spouses or large inherited incomes receive less support in salary that those who depend entirely on their University salaries. Perhaps what is needed is a mathematical formula which would relate salary to calculations of outside income, net assets, number of children, publishing royalties and the like...
...pages of your newspaper have recently given extensive coverage to the application of just such a formula to graduate students, who like tenured professors are adults who have chosen to pursue a scholarly career. One assumes that the Harvard Administration has adopted this measure because it is disturbed by abuses of the current fellowship program by graduate students with large, outside incomes. It doubtless can point to students who supplement comfortable outside incomes with scholarship funds. Only such reasoning can account for a measure designed to enforce a uniform--and low--standard on all graduate students. Judging from the administration...
...physics wonks know, is equal to the number of frisbees (genuine Wham-O's, no cheapie imitations allowed) that one spots floating in the Charles or caught in trees multiplied by the square root of b2 -- 2ac over 4a. If the number derived from this ridiculous, and practically useless formula is more than the number of swimming stories appearing in The Crimson during a one-week span, then spring has definitely arrived-accompanied, with fanfare, by dozens of horrible colds people have picked up as a result of playing frisbee barefoot and in shirtsleeves in 58 degree weather...
...first The Digger's Game seems to follow familiar tracks. It is swift-paced, hard, quickly finished. Yet Higgins' plot exposes character, which deteriorates, producing plot, which further defines character. This describes the intent and achievement, not of a formula thriller, even one that is well written, but of a conventional novel. Of course, one does not want to goad a man who writes well about thugs to write badly about something else. Higgins' most obvious strength, moreover, is a traditional one for crime novelists. His dialogue is brilliant. "All the time, I'm thinking...
...that its basic framework is an improvement over the old system. The plan ends the unstable arrangement under which graduate students would rush about at the beginning of each term to secure a teaching fellowship and thereby stave off financial disaster. The plan calculates need according to a specified formula, and promises to fund all first-and second-year graduate students to within $1000 of the calculated need. (The $1000 gap Union meetings dwindled to 20 to grants awarded in the old way by departments.) The Kraus plan will require an increase of $235,000 in the Faculty budget...