Word: merit
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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OTHER UNION DEMANDS center around the immediate issues raised by the Kraus plan itself. The plan established a student need criterion and promises to found first-and second-year students to within $1000 of their calculated need. The $1000 gap could be closed by merit-based grants, which would be awarded by departmental prerogative. The Union is objecting to both the retention of merit-based grants and certain aspects of the need criteria...
...Merit-based grants should be eliminated for several reasons. The Union does not object to them in principle, but says in a time of financial stringency, merit should be subordinated to need. It is calling for all students in the GSAS to be funded up to their full need. We would go farther. Merit-based grants can act to undermine academic freedom. Because departments decide which students merit the added grants, they exercise a powerful influence over the academic orientation of graduate students. A "meritorious student" might turn out to be one who parrots his academic sponsor's theories, rather...
...students, less than a tenth of those at Harvard, voted to march out on strike if and when they can persuade another tenth to do likewise. Their exhortations attack a litany of alleged abuses--determination of spouse and parental income in judging scholarship need, preservation of awards based on merit, and refusal to recognize the Union as sole agent for grad students. Such complaints amount to no more, it appears, than a continuation of the great "Gimme" game of the sixties, in which the media championed demands of almost any group that considered itself aggrieved...
...Kraus plan is supposed to be traversed by "merit-based grants," Harvard's euphemism for monetary bait to lure "bright" students away from other graduate schools. Grants based on merit, awarded by departmental Faculty, inflict an inherent bias on our liberal academic community--a "bright" student might turn out to be one who parrots his academic sponsor's line. The College long ago eliminated this auctioning for students: the GSAS should follow suit...
...Peckinpah's films have shown, it is today possible for the first time to make artistic violence look real--and exciting. As Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange has shown, violence can also be made to look beautiful--and attractive. Films like these, precisely because they have artistic merit, raise disturbing new questions about the tolerance of society for such things, assuming as seems likely that they represent a major trend...