Word: skim
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Roaming over nine centuries, and celebrating an amateurism unknown at other Southern campuses, Classics 206 also includes "labs" out on the football field. The students box Greek style, lope like Greek marathoners, toss a round stone "shot," skim a flat stone "discus," compete in wildly Hellenic wrestling free-for-alls. Winners go without Achilles' top prize, "fair-girdled women," but the exercise is splendid, and Sewanee's phys ed department is ecstatic...
Some time in mid-December, if all goes well, the spacecraft Mariner II will skim within a scant 10,000 miles of Venus. Like a great mechanical bug, it will point its electronic eyes at the cloud-covered planet; and then, after a brief, 30-minute look, it will soar past to lose itself in orbit around the sun. But before it cruises beyond radio range of earth. Mariner should report back to its human creators and tell them more than man has ever known before about his planetary neighbor, the heavenly body that most resembles earth in orbit, size...
...Denison, built by Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. for the U.S. Maritime Administration, is the U.S.'s first high speed hydrofoil ferryboat. But in Italy, hydrofoil ferries are old hat. Neapolitans scarcely spare a glance any more for the sleek, 140-passenger aliscafi (winged hulls) that skim out across the Bay of Naples four times a day on the tourist run to Capri 18 miles away...
...back a student's heritage." As Scott sees it ("Historians have to take a stand"), much of the heritage revolves around colonial history, the Constitution and slavery, all of which he probes deeply. His students do not just vaguely read that Lincoln and Douglas once debated slavery, or skim snatches of rhetoric. They get mimeographed copies (30 single-spaced pages) of the complete Galesburg debate of Oct. 7, 1858, a fascinating excursion into ante-bellum schizophrenia that reads like a Broadway play. They read not only Lincoln's famed Cooper Union address, but also the rarely mentioned reply...
What to do next is the great Ivy League headache. Should colleges that now skim the top i% of U.S. high school seniors go on to make it the top i%? Harvard's former Dean of Admissions Wilbur J. Bender recently warned that strictly academic standards, neglecting "passion, fire, warmth, goodness, feeling, color, humanity, eccentric individuality," may well produce "bloodless" Harvard students. Other admissions men are trying hard to discount test scores, which because they are so universally high are less useful for making distinctions. Now they assay "nonintellectual" (or nonrational) qualities, earnestly searching for "selflessness" or "sterling character...