Word: used
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...commend you on your fine Essay on student protest [May 3]. In an age of uncertainty and doubt it is all too easy for students to latch on to a certain philosophy and use it as their panacea. Too often this philosophy becomes dogma, blinds its proponents to other viewpoints, and leads them to the all or nothing stage. It is then that the intellectual process breaks down, and a meaningful and productive interplay of ideas, which is so desperately needed now, ceases. I can only hope that both students and administrators will never be afraid to open themselves continually...
...think the best approach in addressing this topic is to assess conceptually what the Black Experience has been. Such assessment is, I think, difficult. For one thing, what contemporaneous yardstick does one use to define the historical limits--the starting point and the context of the Black Experience? How do we decide what is meaningful and valuable in the social, cultural, and political realities of the Black Experience...
Furthermore, what community or segment of Black Peoples should be used as representative of whatever the Black Experience is or has been? Should we use as typical the Republic of Haiti, where black men have ruled a sovereign state since the early nineteenth century, but where also such Black Rule or, if you prefer, Black Power, has been oppressive and dysfunctional for the black masses or lower classes? Or should we take the present-day state of Nigeria, where the polity is rent asunder by fratricidal warfare that was sparked by a grotesque genocidal act committed by one against another...
...these perplexing questions is, unfortunately, rather easy. Thus white police brutality against blacks in Harlem and Mississippi and in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia should constitute the contemporaneous yardstick for the historical delimitation of the Black Experience. With this yardstick, therefore, it would be unthinkable if not treasonable to use the Haitian political experience as an historical example of something relevant and meaningful to the overall Black Experience. Instead, one would have to turn to an historical event like the slave trade to the Western Hemisphere in order to find ideological and emotional sustenance for what I can now call...
Harvard operates on an intangible but effective system of separation of powers. Under Massachusetts law, sole authority over all University functions is invested in the Corporation, which also is the agency least likely to use its power...