Word: tokenism
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...your story about the possible vice-presidential picks of George W. Bush and Al Gore [NATION, July 17], I was a little surprised to see Defense Secretary Bill Cohen as a possible Veep pick by Gore. Choosing the token Republican in the Clinton Cabinet is hardly the way to mend fences with Democratic liberals who are toying with supporting Ralph Nader's Green Party candidacy. The choice of Cohen would just add credence to Nader's line that the big parties are mirror images of each other. JOHN T. ZELAZO Adams, Mass...
Outside the hall, thousands of demonstrators think the Republicans--not the token white males on the platform, but the 82 percent of audience which is them--don't care about them and their causes...
...Faculty should be represented, but in reality there are so many views and opinions among the faculty that a token representative, no matter who was selected, could not possibly represent the various views of the faculty," Gienapp wrote in an e-mail message...
...Harvard Corporation, on the other hand, has shown no such respect for openness. To compensate for the structural absence of outside input, the Corporation has, in past searches, claimed to rely on informal indicators of community opinion. But these attempts are often token gestures with little real value. For example, the last presidential search committee agreed to only one face-to-face meeting with undergraduates--and that was a closed-door meeting with 15 members of the Undergraduate Council. To think that such a meeting could realistically bring the search committee close to the pulse of the student body...
...remaining tunes seem a bit haphazard, none more so than Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me" (8). It's the only song from the past 30 years, and considering the chronological proximity of the selections, one wonders if it doesn't reflect a token vote from a panel with an apparent generational disconnect from post-'60s genres. Maybe it'll take a few years to see the likes of Aimee Mann, Elvis Costello, Prince, Andy Partridge, Steve Earle, John Hiatt, Kurt Cobain and Bruce Springsteen, not to mention...