Quotes About Academic

Tenure was originally invented to protect radical professors, those who challenged the accepted order. But we don't have such people anymore at the universities, and the reason is tenure. When the time comes to grant it nowadays, the radicals get screened out. That's its principal function. It's a very good system, really - keeps academic life at a decent level of tranquility.

Every child has a right to go to high school and end up with a third grade education.

We should also give students more flexibility in the courses they take in high school to prepare them for whatever their goals may be, without sacrificing our rigorous academic standards.

Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister.

Experience proves that anyone who has studied geometry is infinitely quicker to grasp difficult subjects than one who has not.

For example, in treating patients, I find that it is typically useless to concentrate a lot on why a patient is in trouble; that tends to be academic masturbation and can go on for years with no beneficial results.

Academic Marxism is a fantasy world, and unctuous compassion-sweepstakes, into which real workers or peasants never penetrate.

My father was an academic, an eccentric. He was a lecturer.

Sociologist James Evan reviewed citations in more than thirty-four million articles published in academic journals and noted how the number of different citations declined after the advent of search engines. These information-filtering tools, he observed, "serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what isn't."36

I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I'm blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.

Academic freedom is being lost by a great many people who dare to challenge Darwinism. That's a terrifying situation. That's contrary to the principles of science.

To the extent that tenure supports academic freedom, I support tenure. I want no person or system to have any power, real or apparent, to chill academic freedom.

Stuart Rojstaczer writes with enormous wit, style and empathy, and The Mathematician's Shiva is a big-hearted, rollickingly funny novel that's impossible to put down. A tremendous debut.

dogmatic kind of biblical literalism that gained increasing strength among evangelicals toward the end of the nineteenth century was reduced space for academic debate, intellectual experimentation, and nuanced discrimination between shades of opinion.

The standardized Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) for 2013 paint an equally grim picture. Only 43 percent of the 1.66 million students who took the test scored high enough to be classified as "college ready." What is worse, this is the fifth year in a row that fewer than half of the young people who took the test scored above 1550, the threshold for demonstrating the capability to maintain a grade point average (GPA) of B-minus or better in a four-year degree college or university.10

In plain English, the immense investment of tax dollars in a vast government-run educational infrastructure is buying young people a poor education. The data demonstrate there is no overall correlation between the dramatic spending increases in public education during the last several decades and academic achievement.

Consistent with those patterns, there has been essentially no correlation between what states have spent on education and their measured academic outcomes. In other words, America's educational productivity appears to have collapsed, at least as measured by the NAEP and the SAT."15

Herbert Croly (1869–1930) was among the leading academic and progressive thinkers.

Family meals are also critical. Research consistently demonstrates that the family meal is a better indicator of academic achievement than participation in sports or the arts.

As a rule, the extent to which politics can become the object of free scientific inquiry is a most accurate barometer by which to measure the degree of academic freedom in a country.

I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy.

Philosophy is overwhelmingly complicated, its procedure depressingly slow.

Naïve optimists have celebrated science – that is to say: the techniques of mastering life that are based on science – as the road to happiness; but I think I may be allowed to ignore this [idea] completely, in view of Nietzsche's devastating criticism of those "ultimate men" who have "invented happiness". Who believes it, apart from a few overgrown children occupying academic or editorial chairs?

Consequently, if one's luck is bad, one is liable to be increasingly consumed by feelings of resentment toward the agent or agents that one holds responsible for one's victimhood, and this twisting of one's soul in bitterness is a form of damage that the acknowledgment of the real conditions of academic life could have helped one to avoid or, at the very least, mitigate.