Word: pi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sound familiar? No, it's not the Pi Eta Newsletter Incident of last spring. It's the Johns Hopkins Tau Epsilon Phi Newsletter Incident of last week, and it's the big news in Baltimore...
...open letter, Bok tries to paint himself as a "good gay" by denouncing the sexism of Pi Eta while saying not a word about the deeds of Weinberger and Botha and claiming that Harvard University stands above politics. What a sick joke! This in the home of the Kennedy School, where they draw up plans for a nuclear first strike and for the starvation of Central American peasants. This is the place where Vietnam war criminal Henry Kissinger received his training. This is the campus, where napalm was invented...
...Western sculpture in the 20th century has the sheer iconic majesty of the wooden goddess from the Caroline Islands lent to MOMA from Auckland, New Zealand, or the creepy terribilita of the British Museum's figure of the Austral Islands' god A'a, one of Pi casso's favorites. The main value of primitive art to modernism was not formal but quasi-magical. It gave the artist what academism could not: shamanistic power, a sense of the numinous. Muttering the spell, even in macaronic form, still provoked a delicious shudder of possibility...
This imperative becomes all the more urgent if the critic, as Bok has done, gives the appearance of being picky about what he is going to criticize. What is singular about the Pi Eta incident in the free speech arena? Why action here and not in other similar instances where a voice of moral leadership was called for? Why didn't Bok take the initiative and use the Weinberger and the P.L.O. incidents to vent his spleen on the necessity of free speech...
...most revealing aspect of Bok's latest epistle may well have nothing to do with its substance, but rather with what it shows about the character of leadership in this University. Bok writes a good letter. His denunciation of the Pi Eta Club was proper. But is he willing to do more than come crashing down on the easiest target of them...