Word: paramount
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Students recognize that the quality of academic scholarship must be of paramount importance in tenure decisions. But it looks increasingly as if the elaborate calculus by which teaching is taken into account needs some adjustment. And as last week's report said, Harvard's influence in academia gives it a particular obligation to reaffirm the worth of good teaching. If schools like Harvard neglect teaching, the report said, "other institutions are likely to undervalue it as well...
Though the usual matters of salaries and pensions are involved, the paramount issue seems to be free agency, professional sport's current conundrum. The football players' latest crusade for easier passage from team to team coincides with an arbitrator's decree: baseball players, he proclaimed, have been the victims of an owners' conspiracy to flout a free- agent agreement long in place. Unlike major league baseball teams, N.F.L. clubs reserve a right of first refusal on the services of any player whose contract has expired. Should he sign with another of the league's 28 teams, steep compensation...
...Neill's world was one where loyalty to friends and constituent needs was paramount. Of James Michael Curley, whose tolerance of bribery led to his serving as Boston's mayor from a prison cell, O'Neill proclaims, "Whatever you could say about his methods, his heart was always in the right place. One winter he called up Filene's, a major department store, and said to the owner, 'I need 5,000 sweaters this afternoon. And by the way, it's time to reassess your property.' Curley got the sweaters, which went to the poor people of Boston...
...incident was fresh evidence that China's seesaw struggle between doctrinaire Communist hard-liners and pragmatic reformists had taken yet another swing. In recent months, the reformists had been gaining greater control over the economy. Now, however, the ideologues have apparently persuaded Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping that the party cannot afford to shelter those who snipe at its authority. Though Wu was the only intellectual whose departure has been confirmed, as many as four other liberal theoreticians and journalists have reportedly been asked to quit the party...
...power and money. The company's executives, ponderously led by President Ron Miller, are brave but inept in their resistance. Meanwhile, Walt's nephew Roy and the other heirs squabble among themselves. In the end, all concerned muddle their way to a bright new management team -- imported from Paramount and Warner Bros. -- that will restore the company's fortunes. But this seems more luck than foresight. Reality omits two things that old Walt would never have left out of a cartoon: an unambiguous hero and a clear-cut moral...