Word: jerk
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...TERM can be abused. What is important is not the term, but the situation within which it is expressed. The listener bears as much civic responsibility as the speaker whenever a potentially offensive word or phrase is uttered; knee-jerk reactions can foster unnecessary hostility on occasions when no disparagement was intended...
...Mark Lagon of the Harvard Republican club argues that the tradition has broken down. He portray's a "left wing monopoly of political thought and discussion" that frustrates "true political discussion and interplay of ideas." Such monopoly makes a mochery of academic freedom, forcing the student to "regurgitate know-jerk radicalism to succeed in exams." To remedy such abuses, Mr. Lagon recommends that professors adopt a "balanced" approach in their teaching. Our response is two-fold; we find to evidence of a left wing monopoly at Harvard, nor can we find in the call for "balance" anything more than...
...what way do these two individuals constitute a "monopoly"? If Mr. Lagon really has others in mind, surely any of them would have been a better example than Prof. Hoffmann. Any of the horde who force students to regurgitate knee-jerk radicalism" would do--unless Mr. Lagon is unable to find any. His accusations clearly make a mockery of themselves, or would, were it not for their overcomes. Faced with Mr. Lagon's tactics, how can one not call to mind Sen. Joe McCarthy's "discovery" of massive. Communist infiltration of the Departments of State and the Army...
...letter attempts to discredit Harvard Faculty through invective and innuendo ("...force students to regurgitate knee-jerk radicalism"), and meaningless Double-speak ("Harvard...must also be made a home of open discussion instead of an oasis of utopian radicalism) without providing substantive evidence in support of the allegations...
Your article "Making Hostility a Media Event" [Aug. 29] insinuates that Der Spiegel has depicted the U.S. "as a nation of knee-jerk militarists and simultaneously has managed to find the Soviets flexible and reasonable." To support this vague assertion, you quote Der Spiegel on Yuri Andropov: "He has clearly engaged himself for peace." This quote, which is taken from Der Spiegel's published, abridged version of Andropov, a book by Russian Author and Dissident Zhores Medvedev, who lives in London, presupposes an editorial opinion of our magazine. The complete quote reads: "Signals that he [Andropov] has given...