Word: notions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Fried: Well, Richard, when you speak of justice, then that suggests that people should be on a faculty at a major university because a group they purport to represent, and that representation is itself a very troublesome and dubious notion, but a group that they purport to represent is owed, as it were, a certain proportion of seats It's the United Nations conception of a university...
...imagine what it means to be qualified to teach at the Harvard Law School, because qualification suggests some kind of minimum standard in the way that somebody might be qualified to be a policeman, or somebody might be qualified to get a driver's license. I suppose that the notion at institutions such as Harvard is not to get people who are qualified, which is a minimum standard, but to get those who are the best...
...people had an illogical, medieval notion of a university--that secular authority should not be allowed in no matter what," says Martin H. Peretz, a Social Studies lecturer who considered himself part of the "middle left faction" of the Faculty...
...easiest riposte to such new political thought is to claim it does not exist ("Where's the beef?"). By dismissing a new notion out of hand, a critic hopes to pre-empt debate on the idea without being forced to wrestle with the merit or the substance. For longer than anyone in Washington can remember, Presidents have been confronted by frothing opponents who claim, "He has no foreign [or domestic] policy." Translated, that generally means, "I won't accept his ideas but I don't have anything of my own." Fortunately, such obfuscation does not prevail long...
...feasibility of the idea continues to generate superheated controversy. It has been soundly endorsed by two Pentagon scientific commissions, which contend that advances in laser and other directed-energy technology make zapping enemy missiles from space a viable defense strategy. Last week the results of an inquiry into the notion were announced by a nine-man study group of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an organization based in Cambridge, Mass., that supports a nuclear freeze and has been critical of the nuclear-power industry. The group's unsurprising verdict: the Star Wars space defense system envisioned by Reagan...