Word: nas
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...within economics were political (and intellectual, too) in inspiration--the push coming from government, industry and interest groups. Regional studies (Russian, East Asian, Middle East, African, Latin American) were political (and intellectual, too) in inspiration. And so on and so forth...I think the political argument as used by NAS backers is phony...
...think there is a genuine political concern--an anxiety and maybe phobia--among followers of NAS. They consider the quest for curriculum presence by Blacks, Asian-Americans, Latinos, women, gays etc. politically too radical or too leftwing, unlike the centrist and establishmentarian political thrusts that were behind earlier curriculum expansion like policy studies, regional studies...
...this quest is clearly inclusionary or pluralistic: it seeks to expand the composition of student bodies and of faculty in our heretofore mono-racial universities and uni-gender faculty. This concern, I think, is genuine, but need not be cause of anxiety and thus for counter-politicization thrusts like NAS...
...President Stephen Trachtenberg of George Washington University and Harvard's Ford Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus David Reisman '31 expressed their uneasiness with these new obligations, telling The Boston Globe that "People go to enormous lengths to avoid the tag `racist.'" This is, of course, part of the NAS backer's talk about "politically correct" ideology...
...think NAS represents an overkill neoconservative response to some measure of fouling of the atmosphere of open and creative discourse on some campuses consequent to overzealous behavior by supporters of ethnic studies and women studies. All of us--conservatives, liberals, leftists--must take care not to allow our response to each others' occasional zealotry Lebanonize our universities. NAS strikes me as having failed to take care in this regard...