Word: avoiding
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...beating out their friends, by academic toadying or by unrelenting competitiveness. Today at Harvard, the majority of students, faculty and administrators are alienated from each other, locked into a self-perpetuating cycle of contempt, resentment and hostility. Professors peer down at students from the podium and avoid them elsewhere. Students don't go to office hours, and if a professor sits down with them at lunch they stammer or leave. Administrators sneer at student activists, who retaliate with accusations of immorality or deliberate evil. Students cry to advisers, and advisers tell them Harvard is no place for the weak...
...spell, and breaks them both. It promises liberal education and conjures an aura of power. The power is conferred upon you by the diploma, which fools the outside world into believing that you are well-educated. When you are inside, of course, you know better. You know you can avoid confronting either a professor or a course. You know that Harvard teaches most people not liberal arts but how to get what you want, or go under. The promise of humanism remains unfulfilled for all but a lucky few, who latch onto the people here who have not lost sight...
British officials remain confident that the cease-fire will hold, largely because the guerrillas' economically ailing frontline allies are determined to avoid any resumption of civil war. Mozambique's President Samora Machel, for example, supports Mugabe, but he is also committed to peaceful relations with the new Zimbabwe regime regardless of the election's outcome. Machel underscored that commitment last week by reopening his border to Rhodesia for the first time since 1976. Within days, Rhodesians were eating prawns and butterfish in the port of Beira, while Mozambican railway and trade officials were flying to Salisbury...
...installed as the country's new President, the borders were reopened, and some 300 foreign journalists, half of them Western, were al lowed in. Almost immediately there was tension. Photographers snapping pictures of Soviet troops found themselves detained, their film confiscated. One ABC news team tried to avoid interference by entering Afghanistan from Pakistan to film a guerrilla maneuver, only to find that the skirmishes occurred by night. So the newsmen turned on their battery-powered floodlights in the dark. That move attracted the Pakistan army, which rapidly escorted them back over the border...
Playwright Lapine writes amusing lines. At one point the mother asks the younger son why he doesn't get a job. An immigrant matriarch, her next question is pencil-point sharp: "Why did you go to college?" His riposte: "To avoid being asked questions like this after high school." One of the distinctly appealing aspects of Table Settings is its benign ami ability. Even when Lapine's characters verge on cartoons, he presents them as en dearingly human in their follies, desires and genetically nutty ways. His direction of his own play is brisk, and his cast...