He was a leading advocate of maintaining ROTC on the Cornell campus, of compulsory physical education, and of removing Dale Corson as Cornell President because of an alleged decline in academic standards.

Hyperbolus is universally reviled in the sources, even more so than his predecessor: both are associated with an alleged decline in Athenian political culture leading to the loss of the war with Sparta.

New York's long-dominant hip-hop scene has been slumping while Southern hip-hop has been surging, and Southern rappers are often blamed for hip-hop's alleged decline.

These failures often have been attributed, perhaps erroneously, to an alleged decline in brain plasticity upon a child turning age five, a theory that is now facing scientific challenges.

In a 2008 piece in Harper's called "Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading," Ursula K. Le Guin offered a compelling argument to the contrary.

Today, critics remain divided over the film: some see it as an example of Kurosawa's alleged artistic decline, while others count it among his finest works.

In his book, Mr. Itzkoff places most of the blame for America's alleged intellectual decline on what he sees as an economically and intellectually elite caste of misguided liberals.

Related to such things having once been real, a common thread through several of them was its documentation of the alleged decline of magical things from "when the world was young" to the modern day.

A consequence had been the loss of some of the not-so-bright children of local tradespeople or farmers (who now looked to the independent schools), and some alleged decline in the social standing of the school within the town.