Word: processing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Short of including students and faculty on the search committee, releasing the list would be the best step the committee could take toward involving the community in the process. When Derek C. Bok was named president in 1970, the search committee received 1,200 names of possible candidates-almost three times the number that the current committee received. While there are undoubtedly many reasons for the dramatic decline, it seems clear that the community is not nearly as engaged in the search process as it could be. On the other hand, if the community had a chance to comment...
...Others, such as Harold Varmus and Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, have more recently received front-page attention. As the search progresses, more names will surface. But it is hardly fair that most candidates on the list have not been mentioned at all in the media. An open, deliberative process would be far preferable to an otherwise-inevitable dribble of information...
...legitimate technical arguments on both sides of the sampling debate fell by the wayside, as opponents described the process as unconstitutional wild guessing--and supporters, upholding the counterintuitive position that guesses can improve accuracy, were hard pressed to explain standard deviations in sound bites. In the end, the matter was put to an end by a five-to-four Supreme Court decision, and the unadjusted numbers were released by the Census Bureau two weeks ago--but as with another recent five-to-four decision, the question has hardly died away...
...that feelings ran deep--they always do, in every election--but that the American political system was forced to resolve both the technical and the political questions at the same time. For the Florida Supreme Court examining "hypertechnical" recount requirements and for the American people examining the electoral college process, no apolitical answer existed to the apolitical questions. Everything from the mechanics of chads to the machinations of lawyers--every hard-and-fast judgment, indeed every number, became a subject for political debate, culminating in the public's introduction to Supreme Court arithmetic, where the only reasoning one needs...
Without a consensus on the technical details and on the questions reasonable people should be able to resolve (the population of the U.S., the number of votes cast for each candidate), one can hardly expect a civil process of political debate--for when reasonable people disagree and when reason fails as a means of persuasion, what is left but force? The past election was so painful because there was no comfortable realm of objectivity and unbiased judgment from which one could summon widely acceptable solutions to our disputes...