Excerpt:
Here's a list and frequency of some of their hedge or weasel words/roots and phrases:
- may; "may suggest," "such documentation may have existed," "subsequent research may nuance some of the following findings," etc.
- would; "would be hard-pressed to prove," would be expected," would be an oversimplification," "would be natural to assume," etc.
- might; "Buswell might well have made good on this recommendation," "might suggest," "might give the impression," etc.
- seems; "seems likely"
- assume; "it would be natural to assume"
- perhaps; "interracial relationships were... perhaps discouraged," "perhaps prompted by"
- indicate; "the Record indicates that," "our records... indicate that," "one response indicated that," etc.
- unlikely; "it unlikely [sic] that undergraduates of non-European descent ever comprised as much as 2 percent of undergraduates," "it is highly unlikely that"
- possible; "it would be impossible to determine," "as meticulously as possible," "exactly when he did so is impossible to determine," "makes it impossible... to effectively evaluate race relations," "it is impossible to confirm," etc.
- suggest (23); "a single source with no corroborating or clarifying details... suggests an incident of race-based discrimination supported by the College's President," "may suggest," "evidence suggests that," "HRTF research suggests that," "In sum, the evidence suggests that no black students were enrolled at Wheaton College between the departure of Clarence Morris in 1929 and the matriculation of Lewis McGee in 1940," etc.
Such equivocations are spread across the Report.
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