Word: consensus
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There could also be political objections. The delineation of a set of standards requires that we as a faculty reach a consensus--which in turn might be read as imposing conformity or, even more fallaciously, as socializing our students on behalf of this country's "ruling classes." I have heard this view expressed by a few students, but I cannot accept its validity. The standards I have suggested do not represent or preclude any political point of view; indeed, they favor the broadening of sensibilities and the displacement of conventional wisdom by critical thinking...
Columbia Law School Dean Michael Sovern, 44, noted the difference between "the advocate leader and the consensus builder," placing Martin Luther King Jr. in the first category. Radcliffe President Matina Horner, 37, spoke of leaders with "power motivation" as opposed to "achievement motivation" or "affiliate motivation," the last being a polite term for "cronyism." Leaders with power motivation, she suggested, are at once the most glamorous and dangerous of the lot, "able to mobilize resources-and also get us into wars...
There is a danger when a leader points out a direction and finds nobody willing to follow. As Henry Kissinger once put it: "A statesman who too far outruns the experience of his people will fail in achieving a domestic consensus, however wise his policies. [On the other hand], a statesman who limits his policies to the experience of his people is doomed to sterility...
...sketch the background quite that way. Not that they don't agree; they're just more interested in how the foregoing portrait of Southern politics has shattered since the post-war ascendance of economic development and black equality. Southern politics rested, until the last few years, on a consensus of sorts between upper and lower class whites: most white political leaders did nothing to eradicate the inefficient small holdings of poor white farmers, nor did they try to diminish the privileges of poor whites in general versus blacks. For their part, the mass of Southern whites mainly steered clear...
...more of Commentary's intellectuals consider liberal and conservative "necessary shorthand" and, though imprecise, indispensable. Out of their individual contributions emerges a rough consensus...