Word: lange
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...December issue, Science magazine likened Yale Mathematician Serge Lang, a proud and contentious member of the august National Academy of Sciences, to a "sheriff of scholarship, leading a posse of academics on a hunt for error." Last week the sheriff rode again. At the NAS annual meeting in its imposing marble headquarters in Washington, the normally stately proceedings were shattered by an acrimonious debate in which Lang led a successful drive to refuse membership to a distinguished Harvard political scientist: Samuel P. Huntington, director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs and president of the American Political Science Association...
Though entry comes hard to the 1,500-member NAS, essentially an honor society that doubles as policy adviser to the Federal Government, rarely have the incumbents barred so weighty a nominee as Huntington. The main objection raised by the zealous Lang and his supporters: an allegedly specious use of mathematics in Huntington's work to quantify unquantifiable material. For example, Lang cites a passage in the best-known of Huntington's dozen books, Political Order in Changing Societies, in which the ratio of aspiration to % satisfaction was examined in 62 countries. "The overall correlation between frustration and instability," Huntington...
Another component in Huntington's rejection seems to have been his political loyalties, though Lang denies this. A conservative, Huntington has consulted with the Pentagon, served on the National Security Council, supported the Viet Nam War and done research underwritten by the CIA -- all anathema in the liberal-leaning world of academe...
...Serge Lang is a professor of mathematics at Yale. commodation with isolated Vietcong Hamlets."Thus in this instance, the State Department sawthrough Huntington's verbiage, and that memorandumgives further evidence that Huntington's politicalopinions have "no basis in fact...
There was "a big, big discussion on largeissues" before members voted to block Huntington'selection, several Academy members said. Thesemembers said the defeat was largely due to a fileof documentation challenging Huntington'sscholarship that Lang has been distributing tomembers for more than a year...