Word: spineless
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Avowed Holocaust-denier and President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, feted last month by Columbia University’s tough-talking but effectively spineless administrators, received glowing praise from campus commentators and editorialists the country over. Welcoming a vociferous enemy of the United States and, in the words of Columbia president Lee Bollinger, a “petty tyrant,” was a courageous and laudable reaffirmation of free speech and academic freedom...
...welcome sign of a true leader. Public opinion may change on a whim—it faces no consequences—but a leader’s decisions affect an entire country. That leader is stubborn when he refuses to change a failed policy, but he is spineless when he changes his personal beliefs to curry favor with the public...
...have long reduced those within the circle of privilege to writing off—and to leaving unchanged—the minor injustices around them. I had astonished myself by my willingness to toss out principled objections for the sake of self-advancement. Could I really be so thoroughly spineless...
...Summers suggested that the small number of women in science might be due to issues of “intrinsic aptitude,” tensions exploded in what Summers called a “searing afternoon.” “We are not cowards, we are not spineless, and we are not with you,” said anthropology chair Arthur Kleinman. Ruth R. Wisse, a Yiddish literature professor, called it “a show trial to beat all show trials...
...says Ben-Shahar, who also teaches Psychology 1508: Psychology of Leadership, “but he was willing to learn from them.” Ben-Shahar says that anti-Summers faculty members “were not asking for a leader, they were asking for a spineless conformist, a pseudo-leader.” Ben-Shahar offered Summers an open invitation to lecture about lessons he learned while president. Now that’s positive...