Quotes About Academia

People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.

Ultimately, for our family, the opportunity to spend increased time together, balanced with a return to academia, was one we could not pass up.

many of these excellent young people could not, as a general rule, either read or write, as these activities are understood in our best universities.

University of

Calvin: I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! Want to see my book report? Hobbes: (Reading Calvin's paper) "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender modes." Calvin: Academia, here I come!

There is no greater way to ensure that universities remain a hotbed of leftist thought than to guarantee that professors knight their own successors. But that's basically how the Ph.D. system works, with sitting professors approving the work of would-be professors.

It's hard to imagine anything more interesting than learning how we're woven into the enormous tapestry of existence. Where did our universe come from? How special is our world, and how special are we? We allocate tens of billions of dollars annually to NASA, NSF and academia in search of the answers.

I think especially in academia, we are coached to go the route of paying to submit our writing to small publications, like the presses and the quarterly reviews and all of these that are considered 'prestigious.' As a writer in a college program, that's the route that you're taught to go.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.

You don't want to become guilty of plagiarism by letting someone else's words get inadvertently mixed in with your own. If you do feel the need to paste in a block of research while you're writing, be sure to highlight the copied text in a different color so you can go back and remove or rewrite it entirely later.

The evasion of justice within academia is all the more infuriating because the course of sexual harassment is so predictable. Since I started writing about women and science, my female colleagues have been moved to share their stories with me; my inbox is an inadvertent clearinghouse for unsolicited love notes.

Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

You stay in the surreal world of so-called higher learning. You are comfortable there. You have very little reason to leave it.

I would be remiss if I left the impression that my life has been totally preoccupied with scholarly research.

I went to Huddersfield University Business School. That's where I learned my trade.

A book is quite a beautiful thing, even more so learning. Together, however, all they amount to is called book-learning.

Fieldworkers must build a community of sentiment, with local and long-distance members, that opposes the competitive individualism of academia. The lone scholar is a sociological impossibility. Our "individual" works rely on language, literatures, and feedback from colleagues (Becker, 1986).

Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors who when their turn comes, will manufacture professors.

I mean, part of me would love to be a fat tenured professor of theater someday.

I had let my digust with teaching ruin my love of literature.

It's possible this whole "Why do Latinos love Morrisey?" question will haunt us forever. Fortunately, Canadian academics are on the case.

one of the many uses of theory in academic locations is in the production of an intellectual class hierarchy where the only work deemed truly theoretical is work that is highly abstract, jargonistic, difficult to read, and containing obscure references...any theory that cannot be shared in everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the public