Quotes About Academia

Practitioners don't write; they do. Birds fly and those who lecture them are the ones who write their story. So it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position

Academia has a tendency, when unchecked (from lack of skin in the game), to evolve into a ritualistic self-referential publishing game.

Note that scholars are judged mostly on how many times their work is referenced in other people's work and thus cliques are formed of people who quote one another. It's an I quote you, you quote me type of business.

Today academics in abstract disciplines depend on one another's opinion, without external checks, with the severe occasional pathological result of turning their pursuits into insular prowess-showing contests.

In the days of Suetonius, 60% of prominent educators (grammarians) we slaves. Today the ratio is 97.1%, and growing.

the notion of incentives as limited to financial gain cannot otherwise explain the very existence of an economics academia that promotes the idea of self-interest.

Theory should stay independent from practice and vice versa—and we should not extract academic economists from their campuses and put them in positions of decision making.

Birds fly and those who lecture them are the ones who write their story. So it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position.

This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.

Anyway, you don't have to be terribly intelligent to complete a PhD," Karim grumps. "You just need to be stupidly persistent. If anything, being too smart gets in the way—

I would have been miserable in college. I always hated school.

I had considered MIT a place where brilliant people came.

When I first started working at MIT, back in the '80s, our writing department had a joint cocktail party with the Harvard writing department. It was kind of oil-and-water.

I'm really interested in modern history, but to fulfill a History degree at Brown you have to do modern and pre-modern.

When I was a lecturer at UC Berkeley, I wrote a book about monsters.

The world's first university chair in engineering was founded in Glasgow in 1840.2'x

Am I a nihilistic postmodernist or a New Ager in academig drag?

The university doesn't THINK; the university KNOWS. If the university says it's Thursday, then it's Thursday.

Colleges don't make fools. They only develop them.

The job of intellectuals is to come up with ideas, and all we've been producing is footnotes.

There is no crisis to which academics will not respond with a seminar.

If we try to envisage an 'average Canadian writer' we can see him living near a campus, teaching at least part-time at university level, mingling too much for his work's good with academics, doing as much writing as he can for the CBC, and always hoping for a Canada Council Fellowship.

No party in the US can hope to rule without the support of Jewish money and Jewish power in the media and academia.

The average PhD thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one gaveyard to another.