Quotes About Academia

It's one of the tragedies of the modern university that it offers little space to generalists.

The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on!

Scientists aren't necessarily good communicators, because they aren't trained to be good communicators.

It's maybe an unrecognized fact of academia that what you spend a lot of your time doing is convincing people of your vision and raising funds to support your research activity. So in that sense, transitioning to a startup wasn't that big of a transition.

I found that tunnel vision, which an academic career simply requires, horrible.

Das Studium ist nicht einmal Nebensache, es ist Formalität:

Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been so deceived, but so well deceived that we can scarcely get back even a shadow of the truth.

Sociologists are those academic accountants who think that truth can be shaken from an abacus.

I soon discovered, after I became chairman of the NEH, that, for a number of academics, the truth was not merely irrelevant - it no longer existed.

The motto of Harvard isn't 'nice,' it's truth. The motto of Yale isn't 'light and nice,' it's light and truth.

Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world

The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon.

Most areas of intellectual life have discovered the virtues of speculation, and have embraced them wildly. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as theory.

A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.

But as a professor who was popular with his students—and who advocated general education—Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon.

And finally, as if to emphasize their emergence from academia into the world, they dressed and spoke with what one senior mathematician called "a deplorable excess of personality.

The greatest sin of the academic left is that it has become fundamentally aristocratic, writing in bizarre jargon that makes cliches seem abstruse. If you can't explain your ideal to a fairly intelligent 12-year-old, it's probably your own fault.

Academic scientists aren't generally interested in books for the public. So when one comes out, the authors can't expect much praise from scientists. My goal both as a singer and an instructor is to educate through provocation and entertainment.

People used to laugh that academics would study Disney movies. There's nothing more important for academics to study, because they shape the minds of our children possibly more than any single thing.

My older sister has all her degrees in theater, and I couldn't stand the theater geeks!

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.

of all the disciplines in science, paleoanthropology boasts perhaps the largest share of egos

I really think when historians look back on our time they will not divide us into red and blue and Republican Democrat like the things that were wrong with us were wrong with both sides in different ways, I do think they manifest in a more dangerous way on the right. But on the left there is a rot and it comes from academia and it filters down.

Qu'est-ce que vous faites dans la vie, vous? demanda le professeur. - J'apprends des choses (...)