Word: moralizer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...BEGINS by characterizing students as self-interested, impulsive, and impractical in their demands--if the university were a person, one might liken these students to the id. Faculty members, who represent the weight of tradition, the moral conscience, constitute the superego. Outside the Harvard gates and the sheltered ivy-covered buildings, lies Reality, in the shape of "Questionable" donors and unethical corporations, inflation and money worries. And heroically balancing all three, taking the heat from the id, the guilt trip from the superego, the pressure and threats of reality, are Bok and his assistant wise-men, valiantly trying...
What Bok calls "tainted money" can do a lot of good, admittedly, and it would be hard to argue that the University shouldn't take money from anyone of lesser moral standards than Harvard itself. Bok draws the line at accepting stolen goods, however. The only thing Bok overlooks is that there are plenty of legal ways to steal a fortune...
...should not take the money. Harvard should therefore strive to ignore as much as it can about the backgrounds of its potential donors, or so Bok seems to argue: "I am not yet persuaded that Harvard should have an obligation to investigate each donor and impose detailed moral standards." Once Harvard has accepted a gift, he protests, it should not renege on its agreement, because this "may inflict pain on relatives..." The pain inflicted on the donor's victims, of course, doesn't count as much: the oppressed rarely endow chairs...
...little ashamed in doing so. They think their home town is better than the newspaper paints it. Talking to his own readers in Dayton, Editor Rosenfeld found them questioning the editor's self-righteous conviction that he only reports a world he never made: "Readers see us as moral vigilantes . . . the voice of asperity and sterile detachment." One answer to declining newspaper readership, Rosenfeld seems to suggest, is a more human tone, a sense of pity and understanding about the news an editor must report...
...upon their failure to respond to earlier demands or positions taken by the University, if, in other words, at the end of our chain of articulated steps, there exists no exit, only a kind of crying in the wind, then we fail in the end, either to communicate our moral stance or to exercise what little power in the most efficacious way that we have in this situation...