There was a time when big-league university presidents really mattered. The

游客2023-08-23 37

问题 There was a time when big-league university presidents really mattered. The New York Times covered their every move. Presidents, the real ones, sought their counsel. For Woodrow Wilson and Dwight Eisenhower, being head of Princeton and Columbia, respectively, was a stepping-stone to the White House. Today, though, the job of college president is less and less removed from that of the Avon lady(except the house calls are made to the doorsteps of wealthy alums).
Ruth Simmons, the newly installed president of Brown University and the first African American to lead an Ivy League school, is a throwback to the crusading campus leaders of the old. She doesn’t merely marshal funds; she invests them in the great educational causes of our day. With the more than $300 million she raised as president of Smith College from 1995 to 2001, Simmons established an engineering program(the first at any women’ s school)and added seminars focused on public speaking to purge the ubiquitous "likes" and "urns" from the campus idiom. At a meeting to discuss the future of Smith’s math department, one professor timidly requested two more discussion sections for his course. Her response: "Dream bigger."
Her own dream was born in a sharecropper’ s shack in East Texas where there was no money for books or toys—she and her 11 siblings each got an apple, an orange and 10 nuts for Christmas. Though she was called Negro on her walk to school, entering the classroom, she says, "was like waking up." When Simmons won a scholarship to Dillard University, her high school teachers took up a collection so she’d have a coat. She went on to Harvard to earn a Ph.D. in Romance languages.
Simmons has made diversity her No. 1 campus crusade. She nearly doubled the enrolment of black freshmen at Smith, largely by travelling to high schools in the nation’s poorest ZIP codes to recruit. Concerned with the lives of minority students once they arrived at school, she has fought to ease the racial standoffs that plague so many campuses. At Smith she turned down a request by students to have race-specific dorms. In 1993, while vice provost at Princeton, she wrote a now famous report recommending that the university establish an office of conflict resolution to defuse racial misunderstandings before they boiled over.
Her first task at Brown will be to heal one such rupture last spring after the student paper published an incendiary ad by conservative polemicist David Horowitz arguing that blacks economically benefited from slavery. "There’s no safe ground for anybody in race relations, but campuses, unlike any other institution in our society, provide the opportunity to cross racial lines," says Simmons. "And even if you’re hurt, you can’t walk away. You have to walk over that line." [br] Why did Simmons reject the request to allow students with same race to live together in one dormitory?

选项 A、She intended to allow students to make more friends.
B、She expected students from different races to know more about each other, thus reducing racial misunderstanding.
C、Students from the same race would be isolated.
D、She anticipated avoiding quarrels of students from diverse background.

答案 B

解析细节题。题干问。为什么Simmons拒绝了让来自同一种族的学生住在一起这个要求?根据关键词可定位于第四段。原文意思是，Simmons把多样性作为校园改革的头等大事。她首使黑人新生入学人数增加了一倍。少数民族学生来校后，她一直关心学生的情况，一直为缓解令很多校园十分苦恼的种族冷漠情绪而奋斗。由此可看出。她拒绝学生提出的按种族分宿舍的要求是出于想通过不同种族学生之间的交流互动，来减少相互之间的不理解。原文第五段“provide the opportunity tocross racial lines”，提供机会跨越种族界限，也可以解释她这样做的原因。所以，正确选项是B。

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