Quotes About Academia

They do not know very good Latin, these botanists.

I alienated myself from the academic world almost entirely because it's a left-wing world.

I started doing a Ph.D., and then I thought, 'I don't really want to spend all this time on my own in the library.'

Everybody at a university was to her a professor, unless they were students of course, and therefore even worse.

the joys of coauthoring a research paper, it is really time to go to bed.

Brunetti shrugged. They believed him to be a member of the community of scholars...'Community of Scholars, she repeated , It would make the chickens laugh

The swish of the oars and the hypnotic thrum of dragonflies blended with his academic monotone. Camilla, flushed and sleepy, trailed her hand in the water. Yellow birch leaves blew from the trees and drifted down to rest on the surface.

it occurred to me that professors must get so they unconsciously act the way people think professors ought to act;

The productivity now at universities is terrible. Tenure is a terrible idea. It keeps them around forever and they don't have to work hard.

Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.

All I wanted was to be a university teacher.

I recently heard of someone studying the ellipsis (or three dots) for a PhD. And, I have to say, I was horrified. The ellipsis is the black hole of the punctuation universe, surely, into which no right-minded person would willingly be sucked, for three years, with no guarantee of a job at the end.

When told that there was to be the annual jamboree for academic philosophers in Cambridge in 1947, he said it was as if he had been told that there would be bubonic plague in Cambridge, and he would make sure he was in London — which he was!

The same principle held in black universities, where students demanded more and more black teachers. White professors who had virtually dedicated their lives and their academic careers as historians, anthropologists, sociologists, to the problems of racism and its cures, thinking they did this for the good of the oppressed victims of racism (and often suffering social and academic insults as a result), were asked to leave schools in favor of black teachers. Some of them turned very bitter.

Scholars gather in scholarly assemblages to hear in elegant statement what all have heard before. Again, it is not a negligible rite, for its purpose is not to convey knowledge but to beatify learning and the learned.

This answer involves not simply academic pursuits; it affects how a society governs itself, its structure, how its citizens live. If a society does set Goethe's "Word . . . supremely high," if it believes that it knows the truth and that it need not question its beliefs, then that society is more likely to enforce rigid decrees, and less likely to change. If it leaves room for doubt about the truth, it is more likely to be free and

Academic education is the act of memorizing things read in books, and things told by college professors who got their education mostly by memorizing things read in books.

Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out our brains to make room for it.

The university is the last remaining platform for national dissent.

Some full professors could more accurately be described as empty professors.

The regular course of studies, the years of academical and professional education, have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin School.

It is possible to get an education at a university. It has been done; not often.

The mark of higher education isn't the knowledge you accumulate in your head. It's the skills you gain about how to learn.

Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out brains to make room for it.