Word: figureheads
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...relationship with the al-Qaeda leadership. And the public statements attributed to Zarqawi and those of Ayman al-Zawahiri have been noticeably at odds over questions of beheading kidnap victims and of wanton violence against Shiite Muslims. Zarqawi may have embraced the Qaeda brand with Bin Laden as its figurehead, but his essentially autonomous field operation in Iraq has become the movement's center of gravity...
Then he, in turn, stunned the political world by putting all three of his rivals into his Cabinet. It was a seemingly dangerous act, since it risked building up a potential opponent in the next election and ensured that he would be seen by many as a mere figurehead. His opponents were certain that he had failed this first test of leadership. "The construction of a Cabinet," one critical editorial suggested, "like the courting of a shrewd girl, belongs to a branch of the fine arts with which the new Executive is not acquainted. There are certain little tricks which...
...first of many public faux pas committed by University President Lawrence H. Summers. It was 2002, and Harvard’s new figurehead was widely criticized for equating divestment from Israel to one of many “actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.” And, as we are familiar with the reaction to Summers’ controversial comments—and the uproar they can stir—a debate was borne, inciting some serious discussion about a controversial and complicated issue. Though we disagreed with Summers’ conflation...
Implicit in the recent discussion of University President Lawrence H. Summers’ remarks is a debate over the nature of the presidency of Harvard. One view is that our president should be a pleasant figurehead who presides over a growing endowment and speaks donation-related platitudes. The other view, which I favor, is that our president ought to be an active intellectual, someone who participates fully in the scholarly life, engages in academic debates, and sometimes even throws out hypotheses that are wrong...
...competitor institutions make do with presidents who understand that their comments must be blander than my four-month-old child’s rice cereal. Controversy can create difficulties, and if avoiding controversy is more important than intellectual discourse, then the University would be better served by a genial figurehead than by a scholar-president...