Quotes About Academia

Scholars don't usually sit gasping and sobbing in corners of the library stacks. But they should. They should.

Colleges and classrooms should be havens of tranquility, places where thoughtful discussions occur, where students work together with their teachers to acquire knowledge of the arts and sciences.

Collège de France,

Definition of a College professor: someone who talks in other people's sleep.

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

You could be disqualified for a job [at Harvard] if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?

It is easier to communicate with spirits than for one university department to communicate with another.

I am broadly concerned about the slow death of free speech, but particularly in universities and also with regards to the climate change debate.

Old English, the heart and soul of the old regime at Oxford, ceased to be a required course only as of 2002.

A vida entre acadêmicos ensinara-me que uma opinião bem expressada em geral é melhor do que um fato mal expressado no que diz respeito a progresso profissional.

You know what scholars are like; no conscience at all when it comes to their own field, let alone a sense of social delicacy.

I'm completely dyslexic, so academia was never really my path.

I loved history and Eastern European politics.

I never, never in my life took a course in economics.

Academics are becoming much more entrepreneurial these days.

In the field of suppressed languages there are many now that attract more attention ... Basque ... Breton ... Romany.... They all sign up for those.... Not that they study the language: nobody wants to do that these days.... They want problems to debate, general ideas to connect with other general ideas. My colleagues adjust, follow the mainstream, give their courses titles like 'Sociology of Welsh,' 'Psycho-linguistics of Provençal."...

The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.

The Christian of academic tastes accuses his brother of undue emotionalism, of shallow argumentation, of cheap methods of work. On the other hand, your practical man is ever loud in his denunciation of academic indifference to the dire needs of humanity. The scholar is represented either as a dangerous dissemination of doubt, or else as a man whose faith is a faith without works.

From my academic life, I was used to being in the company of very smart people, but it was apparent from the beginning that this was as smart a bunch of men as I had ever encountered. That first impression never changed (though I was to learn, in the years ahead, the severe limitations of sheer intellect

I now teach at American University and the University of Virginia.

Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.

My parents and two sisters were great musicians but my family's approach to music was always way more academic than mine. They were virtuoso players. But they were all impressed that I could sit down at a piano and find a melody. We had a different approach, we had mutual envy.

Lewis was unique in the academia of his day for championing (along with his good friend, J. R. R. Tolkien) children's literature and fantasy novels as serious genres deserving serious consideration.

There is a tolerably general agreement about what a university is not. It is not a place of professional education.