52 Academia Quotes

Darwinism is still very much alive, utterly dominating biology. Despite the fact that no one has ever been able to prove the creation of a single distinct species by Darwinist means, Darwinism dominates the academy and the media.

The total number of Dirichlet's publications is not large: jewels are not weighed on a grocery scale.

When the established members of academia start becoming vocal as to how poor your art is, then you know you're on to something.

I thought I might teach philosophy but the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me; the few islands of greatness seemed to be washed by seas of pettiness and mediocrity.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

[E]volutionists sometimes take as haughty an attitude toward the next level up the conventional ladder of disciplines: the human sciences. They decry the supposed atheoretical particularism of their anthropological colleagues and argue that all would be well if only the students of humanity regarded their subject as yet another animal and therefore yielded explanatory control to evolutionary biologists.

Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.

'I don't know why people question the academic training of an athlete. Fifty percent of the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their classes.'

I could never figure out - or probably did not take the trouble to figure out - what the great philosophical problems are about. The momentous statements I come across are at best a storm in a teacup. There are quite a number of people who have a vested interest in the stuff, make a noble living out of it, and they conspire with one another to keep it alive.

I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.

The discussions of every age are filled with the issues on which its leading schools of thought differ. But the general intellectual atmosphere of the time is always determined by the views on which the opposing schools agree. They become the unspoken presuppositions of all thought, and common and unquestioningly accepted foundations on which all discussion proceeds.

The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.

Of course, history is only a muddle of facts and a fuddle of professors, and anyone who thinks it is one clear voice saying 'Arise, sir Knight' deserves a life sentence in Camelot.

Scholars, who pride themselves on speaking their minds, often engage in a form of self-censorship which is called 'realism.' To be 'realistic' in dealing with a problem is to work only among the alternatives which the most powerful in society put forth. It is as if we are all confined to a, b, c, or d in the multiple choice test, when we know there is another possible answer. American society, although it has more freedom of expression than most societies in the world, thus sets limits beyond which respectable people are not supposed to think or speak. So far, too much of the debate on Vietnam has observed these limits.

In today's world, at least in America, an Einstein or a Newton or a Galileo would probably not be allowed to receive grants to study or to publish his research. They cannot even mention the possibility that-as Newton or Galileo believed-these laws were created by God or a higher being. They could get fired, lose tenure, have their grants cut off. This can happen. It has happened.

[I relaxed] my customary aversion to consulting a book by anyone so immensely pratty as to put 'Ph.D.' after his name (I don't put Ph.D. after my name on my books, after all - and not just because I don't have one).

Condoleezza Rice serves an administration that has trashed the basic values of academia: reason, science, expertise, and honesty. Stanford should not welcome her back.

As long as poets belonged to a broader class of artists and intellectuals, they centered their lives in urban bohemias, where they maintained a distrustful independence from institutions. Once poets began moving into universities, they abandoned the working-class heterogeneity of Greenwich Village and North Beach for the professional homogeneity of academia.

In social terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one poet now asks another upon being introduced is 'Where do you teach?' The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It's just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform with institutional ones.

I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions. This is a belief deliberately maintained by the other side because if they admitted that the issue is not a scientific question, they would have to admit that their science is antiquated and that, in academic circles, it occupies the position of astrology and not one that has any justification for serious consideration in scientific discussion. It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.

Anything which uses science as part of its name isn't: political science, creation science, computer science.

If poetry is like an orgasm, an academic can be likened to someone who studies the passion-stains on the bedsheets.

When may we hope to see your Harvard lectures published sir?' an undergraduate asked the late Professor Austin. 'You may hope to see them published any time' was the characteristic reply.

He sent me a letter from India, where I think he got a fellowship to spend a year or so. He sent me a letter that read, I've just met a wonderful guru who can read minds. 'I want you to' - Allen had a way of saying 'I want you to do this, I want you to do that' - 'I want you to get him a position in the Philosophy Department.' I wrote back, 'Dear Allen, the members of the Philosophy Department want nothing so little as to have their minds read.'

Philosophers no longer write for the intelligent, only for their fellow professionals. The few thousand academic philosophers in the world do not stint themselves: they maintain more than seventy learned journals. But in the handful that cover more than one subdivision of philosophy, any given philosopher can hardly follow more than one or two articles in each issue. This hermetic condition is attributed to 'technical problems' in the subject. Since William James, Russell, and Whitehead, philosophy, like history, has been confiscated by scholarship and locked away from the contamination of general use.

Could someone please tell me how this will affect me? Come on, this is Harvard, folks. I came all the way out here to learn this.

'Bad books on writing and thoughtless English professors solemnly tell beginners to 'Write What You Know', which explains why so many mediocre novels are about English professors contemplating adultery.'

His complexion exceeding faire - he was so faire that they called him the Lady of Christ's College.

He was a learned man, of immense reading, but is much blamed for his unfaithfull quotations.

Chomsky's morally impassioned and powerfully argued denunciation of American aggression in Vietnam and throughout the world is the most moving political document I have read since the death of Leon Trotsky. It is inspiring to see a brilliant scientist risk his prestige, his access to lucrative government grants, and his reputation for Olympian objectivity by taking a clearcut, no-holds-barred, adversary position on the burning moral-political issue of the day, and by castigating the complacent mythology of 'specialized expertise' under which many academic intellectuals shrug off the crimes committed by their government, only provided they are not naked enough (e.g., the Dominican intervention) to defy the most accomplished casuistry. --Raziel Abelson, April 20, 1967 [192]

Chomsky is an irresistible example of the quality problem that besets the market for academic public intellectuals. --Richard Posner, 2001 [214]

I think that I offended many people when I decimated the postures and the lies of Noam Chomsky in an article I wrote called 'Poisoning the Well in Academe.' That wasn't a conservative screed on my part. That was a liberal's devotion to the truth, and the exposure of a liar, a person who assaults the mind by putting in false evidence. --John Silber, November 2005 [227]

Reading Failed States, I had an epiphany: that by applying a Chomskian analysis to his own writing, you discover exactly the same subtle textual biases, evasions and elisions of meaning as used by those he calls 'the doctrinal managers' of the 'powerful elites'. The mighty Chomsky, the world's greatest public intellectual, is prone to playing fast and loose. It is important to recognise this fact because the Chomskian analysis has become the defining dissident voice of the blogosphere and a certain kind of far-left academia. --Peter Beaumont, June 18, 2006 [231]

Many young poets, nowadays, are insured against everything. For them poetry is a game like court tennis or squash racquets - one they learned at college - and they play it with propriety, as part of their social and academic existence; their poems are occasional verse for which life itself is only one more occasion.

The decay of our culture since 1941 can be measured by the fact that academic historians today are no longer interested in historical truth or interested in it only marginally; what really interests them is jobs. They match the anthropologists and geneticists who, with practiced effrontery, can say that all races are equal and there is no difference between them. There are now 'scientists' who boast they are so versatile they can prove anything, for a suitable fee, while others abuse spectroscopes to prove that a painted rag is a 'Holy Shroud,' or use quantum mechanics to prove that the old Jew-god converted mud into Adam. 'Truth' is whatever pays the most. The academicians have conformed to what is now the American ethic. Whether any nation so decadent and depraved can or should survive is a question I am unwilling to consider.

Richard Feynman became so exasperated [at the National Academy of Sciences] that he resigned his membership, saying that he saw no point in belonging to an organization that spent most of its time deciding who to let in.

We've associated that word philosophy with academic study that in its own way has gotten so far beyond the layman that if you read contemporary philosophy you've no clue, because it's almost become math. And it's odd that if you don't do that and you call yourself a philosopher that you always get 'homespun' attached to it.

In an ideal University, the force of living example should fire the student with a noble ambition to emulate the learning of learned men, and to follow in the footsteps of the explorers of new fields of knowledge. And the very air he breathes should be charged with that enthusiasm for truth, that fanaticism of veracity, which is a greater possession than much learning; a nobler gift than the power of increasing knowledge; by so much greater and nobler than these, as the moral nature of man is greater than the intellectual; for veracity is the heart of morality.

Gentlemen, even if one allows that he is an important writer, are we next to invite an elephant to be Professor of Zoology?

Through the burgeoning university network, it was suddenly possible to think of oneself as a national poet, even if the nation turned out to consist entirely of English departments.

The Grand Inquisitor explains that you have to create mysteries because otherwise the common people will be able to understand things. They have to be subordinated so you have to make things look mysterious and complicated. That's the test of the intellectual. It's also good for them: then you're an important person, talking big words which nobody can understand. Sometimes it gets kind of comical, say in post-modern discourse. Especially around Paris, it has become a comic strip, I mean it's all gibberish. But it's very inflated, a lot of television cameras, a lot of posturing. They try to decode it and see what is the actual meaning behind it, things that you could explain to an eight-year old child. There's nothing there. But these are the ways in which contemporary intellectuals, including those on the Left, create great careers for themselves, power for themselves, marginalize people, intimidate people and so on.

One physicist writes a study on microphysics, but another writes a book on the importance of Lenin's and Engels' works for the development of physics; one mathematician proves theorems, another publishes demagogery on ingenious mathematical ideas of classical Marxists.

Looking around at the faces of his colleagues in the Senior Common Room he felt reassured: not a Lineament of Gratified Desire to be seen.

That's the attraction of the conference circuit: it's a way of converting work into play, combining professionalism with tourism, and all at someone else's expense. Write a paper and see the world! I'm Jane Austen - fly me!

Did Keynes create a sense of hope? Oh, unquestionably. There was this breath of hope and optimism, and I came back from Cambridge to find a whole group of people here who had also read The General Theory.

I really want to say that there are no major disagreements ... I think the tendency of American intellectuals to learn their evolution from him [Gould] is unfortunate, and that's putting it mildly.

The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth.