Quotes About Academia

At UCLA I quickly learned the knack of getting grades, a craven surrender to custom, since grades had little to do with learning.

The truth is: nobody bothers to kill poets in America. It's enough to buy them in universities. Undead.

But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years.

Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: [from academe] A modern school where football is taught.

Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler used his paper as a megaphone to promote eugenics, and universities such as Yale, Stanford, and Harvard bestowed their academic credibility to the cause.

I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. While I'm writing a book, which I probably do two out of every three years, it's like having a second job. I squeeze in the hours when I can.

I then moved to the University of Western Ontario where I was made a full professor in 1985.

I'd like to see the University of Western Australia and the other four or five universities in Western Australia really excel through having some of the greatest minds in the world attracted to it.

As it happens, although I was at MIT on the faculty full-time for 18 years and then at Harvard for another 16, so I've always been in full-time academia, I always found it was both beneficial for my research and beneficial for the other work to be involved in the practicing community.

I did a history degree once.

Harvard makes mistakes too, you know. Kissinger taught there.

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

Too many years away from academia renders you pretty incompetent at research and teaching. So I had to go back.

I served as Dean until 1974, when I stepped down to return to full time teaching and research.

I mean, when I got to Brown, the place was riven, because you had older professors who were basically new critics and had been teaching a certain way for 30 years. And then you had this other gang who was down with the semiotic program. And as a student, you were, in a way, forced to choose which cohort you were going with.

At the end of the day, I want to be a teacher at a university, teaching film or acting.

I liked teaching, but the bureaucracy of academia and the petty intrigue... It wasn't a good fit. Once I admitted that myself, that I didn't like academia, I was ready to try TV.

We can make mayors and officers every year, but not scholars.

But I don't consider history to be a field. It's just all the stuff that's happened so far. You have to call it a field so people who study what happened in the past can get a job teaching blank. But it doesn't seem to me that it's a subject.

Between the lines Phaedrus read no doubts, no sense of awe, only the eternal smugness of the professional academician.

I think like an academic egghead, believing that if I write enough paragraphs about a scary subject, give enough lectures about it, it will give up and go away quietly. And if everyone took enough classes about the biology of violence and studied hard, we'd all be able to take a nap between the snoozing lion and lamb. Such is the delusional sense of efficacy of a professor.

They know that professional success is no longer solely linked to academic success, as it once was.

He often admitted that schools reward people who study more and more about less and less.

This was Hist and Lit, after all. If you couldn't work the term liminal into your tutorial, you were doing it wrong.