Word: questionable
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Though practically no one now buys the '60s' doctrinaire readings of color-field painting -- the arguments, so often lapsing into petty-historicist casuistry, by which Greenberg's disciples set up this reductive art of pure, thin color as the climax of painting's dialogue with itself -- there is no question that Frankenthaler set the style going...
...here the disagreement over the means and ends of a pluralist community comes to a sharp focus. Like the battle between the cultural right and left, with the literary or historical canon somehow held ransom between the two, the question over minority hiring seems to revolve around the perceived "lowering of standards" needed to diversify the faculty. Just who sets--and who judges--the standards of course is the most difficult question of all to answer. In a pluralist society, what are the certainties...
...frame the question of pluralism in another, more violent language. On one March night, two Black students run to catch a University shuttle bus but are pulled off by Cambridge police, searched and left without explanation on the curb. Ask the police why they acted so, and they answer they saw two men running on a street after a nearby convenience store robbery. Granted, they say, the suspect in the robbery was a single white male, but under the mercury lights in the Square perhaps skin color is too deceptive...
Cambridge cleared its officers of harassment, calling their action "professional and appropriate," and the question clearly became, appropriate for whom? For which race? For the 500 galvanized into protest that week, the answer was clear, as it was for Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III and University Vice President and General Counsel Daniel Steiner, who apologized to the students and appealed to Cambridge and the police. But again, the police have not responded...
Again, the question turns on the problem of whether a system geared toward those who have long been in the country essentially discriminates against a people who by law could not emigrate freely into the U.S. before the 1960s. And who decides on "diversity," such as exemplified by athletic ability...