Word: lessening
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This is the third year of his tenure at A.B.T, which is currently playing an ambitious eleven-week season at New York City's Metropolitan Opera House. His initial goal was to create a strong, youthful corps de ballet and to lessen A.B.T.'s chronic reliance on international stars. The corps now is an impeccably disciplined instrument, but the members are so fresh in their almost votive commitment that their precision never suggests a drill team. At the start of his first season, Baryshnikov also picked out a few youthful dancers and virtually pushed them out onstage...
While administrators seem to welcome this change in the make-up of the Black student body, many Black campus leaders bemoan, what they perceive as an apathetic community. Cooke criticizes the University for this: "The University has made a concerted effort to integrate Black students and lessen the perception of us as a unit." She sarcastically adds, "I think it's been successful--I tip my hat to them...
Ethel Klein's situation is not a new one, but that does not lessen our anger and dismay. The University is creating a dangerously self-perpetuating situation, as its refusal to grant scholarship of and by women the respect it deserves makes it increasingly unattractive for people in Women's Studies and female scholars to come here. The development of Women's Studies in the world at large will continue with or without Harvard's approval, and it will be more than a little distressing if the University succeeds in completely cutting itself off from this new field...
...high number of children of alcoholics who become addicted, Vaillant believes, is due less to biological factors than to poor role models. Being raised in a warm, close-knit family does not lessen a child's chances of becoming an alcoholic, nor does coming from a family with many problems increase the risk. Vaillant is reluctant to make predictions about behavior, but believes that the best sign that a child may not develop into an alcoholic as an adult is an "ineffable" quality-ego strength-that seems to come from experiencing a sense of competence when the person...
...mean when one finds somebody responsible for an act because he should have known what would happen? He is not imputing stupidity; the person would probably be let off the hook for merely behaving stupidly. Is he implying gross incompetence or a shallow carelessness? Perhaps, but these contentions, too, lessen the degree of personal culpability. No, when someone in authority is told that he ought to have anticipated a disaster, it means that the grand total of his professional experience and knowledge demanded, beyond reasonable doubt, that he behave differently than he did. Indeed, it is also beyond reason able...