Quotes About Academia

The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.

College professors used to be badly paid and worth it. Colleges used to be modest institutions; they should go back to being modest institutions.

I see the root of the education crisis in the primary and secondary schools. Academia is doing a fairly good job. The root of the problem is the teachers. Some are great. But too many of them are not capable of being good role models. They can't control the classes. They lose too much time trying to create a learning environment.

I went into academia thinking that there'd be constant reciprocity between my scholarship and my creative work but found that doing one always turned my mind into the sort of tool that was badly suited to doing the other.

In academia in general, there's this push toward using comics as an educational tool.

Following Rice, I went to Caltech for a Ph.D in physics, without any strong idea of what I wanted to do for a thesis topic.

When I got my PhD, it was a time when there were just no jobs for PhDs. Period. PhDs were getting the lowest paid technician jobs, if they were lucky, in any kind of science.

A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.

Things may move slow in the academic world, but I continue to move at a pace relative to the urgency of the moment, looking forward to the time when the academic world can catch up.

For people who might struggle to survive at basic levels, it may be more fulfilling to claim an identity like butch, which does not necessarily require engagement with institutions like medicine or academia, which have historically sought to kill, pathologize, or ignore people of color and poor people (and queers). Most transgender scholarship leaves little room for groups of people or ways of being that do not fit a narrow definition of what is scholarly enough or trans-gressive enough.

Barre a un lado a esos parásitos de academia subsidiados, que viven de las ganancias de la mente de otros y proclaman que el hombre no necesita moral, ni valores, ni código de conducta. Esos, que se consideran científicos y aseguran que el hombre es sólo un animal, al que no conceden en el mapa de la existencia el lugar que le han concedido al más insignificante de los insectos.

For the rest of us, it is a miniature preview—in the microcosm of the academic world—of what is to happen to the country at large, if the present cultural trend remains unchallenged.

Hasta el ámbito académico, que uno podía considerar un reducto seguro para los gruñones y misántropos, está empezando a sufrir las incursiones del pensamiento positivo.

Quem tem familiaridade com a vida acadêmica sabe que ela gera cultos ideológicos propensos ao dogma e resistentes à crítica.

I could have seen myself going into academia, but I don't love it; I just like it.

Thinkers powerfully influenced by Marx and overwhelmingly influential in much of the academy today (such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida) modified the Marxist simplification essentially by replacing "economics" with "power"—as if power were the single motivating force behind all human behavior (as opposed, say, to competent authority, or reciprocity of attitude and action).

tedious, ideology-ridden professors.

Theorists are a smart bunch (in theory),

'Mongst all these stirs of discontented strife,O, let me lead an academic life;To know much, and to think for nothing, knowNothing to have, yet think we have enow.

Me? I'm being ridiculous? You're the one flirting for your thesis. What the hell kind of degree is that anyway? A doctorate of dick tease?

The thing that happens remarkably often is that the people who are writing a dissertation believe they need to speak to me in order to do their dissertation. They need to interview me.

Professorship is not a career, but rather a life's pursuit. The people with whom I work daily exemplify and remind me of this promise.

Harvard is the home of American ideas.

I have an affinity for the law. I like looking at the small type on contracts, and if I could have afforded law school, I probably would have gone.