Word: greats
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...those who disagree with him, is equally incorrect. These are, after all, good men--brilliant, resolute, high-minded men, firm in their conviction that they are doing what is best for the institution that has elevated them to positions of eminence. The Harvard they serve is likewise a great institution, a home for scholars and leaders and great ideas. The problem is that the institution dictates that the men--and the very few women--who serve it, see only the greatness, consider only the enormity of their positions, feel only the weight of history. It does not let them...
...they served so well, and which will even then be served well by younger editions of themselves, might not have been served differently. They might wonder if the demands of the institution might not have allowed some room for human considerations; they might wonder if the imperatives of imagined greatness, of dealing rationally and efficiently with a vicious world, precluded so completely a concern for the lives and feelings of those who were not great. If they are truly human, they will consider these matters in 30 years; if they are truly wise, they will consider them...
...TAUGHT, before I came to Harvard, that this is wrong. I learned that situation ethics have only a limited value--that they can be applied only where there is not a great, compelling moral reason on the other side of the fence. Although I learned to be careful not to apply my own standards to every case--to be tolerant of other views, which the vast majority of the time do not involve great moral principles--I was taught that occasions still arise when it is simply wrong to ignore the basic moral principles. The most basic of these...
President Bok and Dean Rosovsky and all their sundry other deans and counsels and vice presidents must recognize these distinctions, for they are intelligent people. But they ignore them; they have found it too easy to merge themselves with the great immortal institution they work for, to forget the most basic part of their humanity, which is their own mortality, and that of those around them. That is why, when they see opposition, they immediately view it as a threat to order, never thinking it might be an appeal to simple human virtue. They are sadly convinced that they...
...explain how animals anticipate quakes. Writing in Nature, Biochemist Helmut Tributsch of the Max Planck Society's Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin says that animals can apparently sense, quite literally, that a quake is in the air. His theory: before the major shock hits, the earth releases such great masses of charged particles, or ions, that the atmosphere is almost alive with electricity. Such electrostatic activity, while discomforting enough to humans (it can cause headaches, irritability and nausea), may be more irritating to the delicate senses of many animals...