Word: tepidity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fractured civility, in fact, seems a tepid description of campus behavior that sometimes borders on the barbarous. This past fall, frat members at the University of Mississippi scrawled KKK and WE HATE NIGGERS on the naked bodies of two white pledges and dumped them on the campus of Rust College, a mostly black school nearby. At Bryn Mawr, freshman Christine Rivera found an anonymous note slipped under her door. "Hey Spic," it said, "if you and your kind can't handle the work here, don't blame it on the racial thing . . . why don't you just...
...listen to abhorrent ideas, our own are valueless. They become totems that we carry around simply because everyone does. To quote a popular cliche, the essence of intellectual progress is the clash of ideas: when there is only one "correct" idea, everything stagnates in a bath of tepid, kneejerk liberalism...
...that followed was almost Dickensian; prisoners came to life all around, clamouring at the bars, thrusting out their food pots for lunch. Zac and I had no pots, but Blacka and Paul shared their food with us. Four years of boarding school food had not prepared me for the tepid stew of rotten meat and boiled yams that emerged from the bucket. We were given a large mug of warm, brown water to share amongst the five of us. We passed the cup aroud, savouring each sip; the cell was stifling and hot, making the filthy water palatable. The meal...