Word: argumentativeness
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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Tribe was one of 11 nationally known law professors, including conservatives as well as liberals, who wrote and signed an amicus curiae brief in support of the Democrats' petition. Another co-signer, William Van Alstyne of Duke Law School, challenges the argument that there have been at least 130 acts of war that lacked congressional approval. "The number is widely inflated," he says. "A lot of them don't count, since they were for limited circumstances and for short periods of time." In his view, the fact that the congressional war-power clause has sometimes been ignored does not render...
...list of charges against the English department is long. One valid complaint is the department's disregard of the literature of minorities and colonized peoples. But the argument for increased representation of these literatures in the canon is complicated, and detracts from the more immediate question of the fate of American literature in academia. With the nearly catastrophic state of secondary education in America, our people are woefully ignorant of the shape of their own culture. A culture that cannot assume responsibility for itself certainly cannot assume responsibility for another. A country that cannot distinguish its intellectual history from...
...department's least convincing argument supporting the greater emphasis on British literature states simply that it is of a higher quality. Such a position would probably be thrown out on a campus where the British scholars did not so overwhelmingly outnumber their American counterparts, but to pretend that literature is evaluated or prized by its "artistic value" alone is smug and ignorant. Shelley called poets "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Literature establishes a dialogue of ideas, and is therefore an inherently political act. Writers frequently use whatever they consider as the political, social, or structural subtext of their contemporaries...
...most appealing argument the department could make for the relative strength of its British scholarship is that it is impossible to understand the American literary tradition without first understanding its British precursor. This assertion is legitimate, but it does not excuse the weakness of the American curriculum here. An undergraduate English concentrator rarely has the opportunity to use British literature as a window on American literaure, because he or she rarely has the opportunity to study American literature...
This, it seems, is the guts of Plotz's argument: "The result of this campus activism and media bombardment [by just a few radicals] is that the only voice that gets heard at Harvard is the voice of the PC." Which means that "Harvard's sheeplike liberal majority is large enough and accepting enough of this PC ideology to stifle campus debate." In the end, the blame falls on the "PC crowd...