Word: moralizer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Blip. The Reagan side of the picture disappeared. The President's helicopter, Americans were told, would lift off the White House lawn and bear him away, toward a speech in Connecticut that had nothing to do with the Iran- contra hearings. It was a strange effect, a kind of moral vanishing. Reagan at that moment became an absence...
What happened in the Senate Caucus Room last week was a sort of drama of the moral settlement of America. First there was the frontier, the wild places where savages roamed and life was dangerous and action was survival. The pioneer, the early cowboy, the vigilante all kept guns loaded and shot fast. One did not survive by regulations and laws and merely mental, abstract things. Justice was a rougher business, and even at that ran a distant second to coming out of it alive. "The essential American soul," D.H. Lawrence once extravagantly wrote, "is hard, isolate, stoic...
...balance any possible Western centrism, the foreign cultures Core should be strengthened so that its courses emphasize the values of these societies, instead of attempting to teach thousands of years of history in three months. The moral reasoning Core could afford to dispose of some of the courses that do not really examine thinking about ethical questions, and to include more that do. The professional schools should also require such courses on morality (except divinity, which seems to have had a monopoly on them), rather than offering the poorly-attended electives on ethics that currently exists...
...addition, students can learn ethics through the moral leadership of the university they attend. Bok, among others, has argued that the way institutions address their own ethical challenges can set an example for its students to learn from. But does that mean that students who attend Columbia, which has decided to divest its holdings in South Africa, are receiving a better ethical education than Harvard students...
...Teaching students values outside the classroom takes more than one such act. Their leadership must be more farreaching. If students do indeed learn from universities' actions' then every message that Harvard sends out to its students must be moral. And that may not be compatible in a large, bureaucratic Harvard of today that sometimes values power more than brilliance, and where competition is the order of the day. What needs to change is the atmosphere of the Harvard community and the behavior of its members...