Academia Quotes
54 quotes
"The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit."
"To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)"
"There are times when wisdom cannot be found in the chambers of parliament or the halls of academia but at the unpretentious setting of the kitchen table."
"What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults."
"The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name."
"To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life., 8 September 1935)"
"See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort."
"I am concerned only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by the modern world. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort expended by the person who has not the tools at his command."
"The problem with studying is that it gets in the way of education."
"There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable."
"To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or"
"Incidentally, I notice that our professors, trying to show off to their students, rant and rail against the state and against law and order, while expecting that same state to punctually pay their salaries, pensions, and family allowances, so that they value at least this kind of law and order. Make a fist with the left hand and open the right hand receptively—that is how one gets through life."
"What'll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?" demanded Miss Ha"
"I don't recall that when I was in high school or college, any novel was ever presented to me to study as a novel. In fact, I was well on the way to getting a Master's degree in English before I really knew what fiction was, and I doubt if I would ever have learned then, had I not been trying to write it. I believe that it's perfectly possible to run a course of academic degrees in English and to emerge a seemingly respectable Ph.D. and still not know how to read fiction."
"...you sometimes note an impatience on the part of a specialist that the public does not show sufficient interest in his assemblage of information as such. He is likely to conclude that the average person is somewhat stupid. The opposite is true. It is a sign of native intelligence on the part of any person not to clutter his mind with indigestibles."
"And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no illusion, but equally real was the yawning pit of exhaustion inside her. She just felt so tired sometimes. And because of everything her parents asked of her, she was ashamed of being tired. She could not, would not let the pit swallow her up, as much as she sometimes wanted it to."
"Needless to say, that meant that the Braekbills student body was quite the psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality. And to actually want to work that hard, you had to be at least a little bit screwed up."
"Human history has become too much a matter of dogma taught by 'professionals' in ivory towers as though it's all fact. Actually, much of human history is up for grabs. The further back you go, the more that the history that's taught in the schools and universities begins to look like some kind of faerie story."
"Universities are renowned for their tolerance of unusual characters, especially if they show originality and dedication to their research. I have often made the comment that not only are universities a 'cathedral' for worship of knowledge, they are also 'sheltered workshops' for the socially challenged."
"To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something... something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms -- some careless bright and harsh trifle that had grazed a stretch of raw flesh."
"During those years he met his seminars,went & lectured & read, talked with human beings,paid insurance & taxes;but his mind was not on it. his mind was elsewheresin an area where the soul not talks but sings& where foes are attacked with axes."
"You'd think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him," said Miss Hillyard. "It didn't pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about -- but in the end it left him worse of."But that," said Peter, "was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out."
"Social power is at stake in theory-making, but the workings of this power are often unacknowledged -- and overdeter"
Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World
"[Bruno] Latour argues that one of the foundational gestures of western modernity has been the effort to formulate and police a heightened antimony between nonhuman nature and human cu"
Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World
"Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates."
"Hirota feels strongly drawn toward nature and the natural, is hyper-sensitive to the artificial—particularly that most cramped and constraining man-made creation, society—and does his best to avoid it."
"But the Wisconsin tradition meant more than a simple belief in the people. It also meant a faith in the application of intelligence and reason to the problems of society. It meant a deep conviction that the role of government was not to stumble along like a drunkard in the dark, but to light its way by the best torches of knowledge and understanding it could find."
"A large majority of our respondents were inspired by a tension in their domain that became obvious when looked at from the perspective of another domain. Even though they do not think of themselves as interdisciplinary, their best work bridges realms of ideas. Their histories tend to cast doubt on the wisdom of overspecialization, where bright young people are trained to become exclusive experts in one field and shun breadth like the plague."
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
"Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
"He had liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism was a fatuous dream; he thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies."
"But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before."
"What I learned on my own I still remember"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
"In the midst of battle, you need something versatile to keep your focus"
"No special academic expertise is required for insight into the Orwellian use of language, only clear thinking and common sense."
"...I'm worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialetics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking acadamese instead of English and they don't really know what's happening in the real world."
"Being paid to wonder seems like a heavy responsibility at times."
"The classical anthropological question, What is man?—"how like an angel, this quintessence of dust!"—is not now asked by anthropologists. Instead, they commence with a chapter on Physical Anthropology and then forget the whole topic and go on to Culture."
"Ideas matter—and philosophy is the art of thinking about them rigorously. In my view, that should be done in as public a forum as possible."
"It’s the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him."
"Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information, which is how I got a good job in journalism."
"There were no actual villains, just inertia. The administration genuinely wanted more diversity for reasons of its image as well as fairness, notwithstanding the cranky alumni letters in The Daily Princetonian. ... Hiring committees had not a clue where to look for or how to attract suitable candidates. And so, though a high-level recruitment plan existed on paper, there was only foot-dragging and defensive excuse making."
"I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter."
"Shulman argues that work that is valued is work that is presented to colleagues. The failure to make this kind of wider connection weakens the sense of community. This happens in scholarly life when such essential functions as professional service or teaching do not get discussed openly or often enough."
Charles E. Glassick, Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate
"All my life I had thought that if you worked hard you would be rewarded. If you worked your ass off, there would be some reward for you. But now I knew that the reward was just the chance to work your ass off."
"Intellectual discourse and investigation is admittedly great fun but only truly meaningful when conducted in the service of others."
"Adjunct teachers are the professorial equivalent of the migrant Mexican farm laborers hired during harvest. If you can get a good contract at the same farm every year, where the farmer pays you on time and doesn't cheat or abuse you, then it's in your best interest to show up consistently from year to year."
"She took a deep breath. "Let me begin again." If this girl wanted to play ball in front of her department head, Christine would bring it. She closed her eyes and accessed the most expensive Philo Department vocabulary words she possessed."Well, as human beings, when we immanentize the eschaton…"
"Have I mentioned the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, and the collapse of a section of the Bay Bridge, or the Oakland ‘firestorm’ of 1991? No need. There are already there, in my narratives that fail to mention them, in my dreams that fail to represent them."
"One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas, everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy?"
"Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
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