Richard Ernst Quotes

I think there is value in having practising scientists as leaders of research institutions.

In recent years, more and more of my time has become absorbed by administrative work for the research council of ETH-Z of which I am presently the president.

I served seven years as the chair of the Princeton economics department where I had responsibility for major policy decisions, such as whether to serve bagels or doughnuts at the department coffee hour.

After forty years in the lab, I was asked in 1991 to become president of The Rockefeller University. Unlike a working scientist, being president for seven years provided an opportunity to interact with scientists in many different fields and broadened my scope of the natural sciences.

In the sciences particularly the large public universities must and do take an active role in fostering creativity and independence; otherwise the fields will wither, and along with them even the aspirations of wealth and power.

I was a teacher and an administrator at Parson's School of Design, and as an administrator, I was associate dean. And in that role, I went around fixing things that were broken. And the Parson's fashion program was broken.So fashion chose me. It needed to be developed and evolve. I don't know if it comes naturally to anyone.

This line of research continued when I went, and brought my research group with me, to the new University of California, Irvine campus in 1966 to become the founding Dean of the School of Physical Sciences.

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

The publicity of the Nobel Prize has made clear that the research work connected with the Quantum Hall Effect was so successful because a tremendous large number of institutions and individuals supported this activity.

I'm a psychologist. I was a psychology faculty member, and then I became an administrator of the department, then the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. At the time of the presidential search, I was the dean.

My father was a headmaster in England and then the dean of a college in Australia. We moved there when I was about five, so my education was in Australia, and I always felt I was Australian even though my passport was British.

The U.S. can still maintain research institutions, such as Caltech, that are the envy of the world, yet it would be hubristic and naive to think that this position is sustainable without investing in science education and basic research.

I had come from Los Angeles - I had been there a partner of Gruen Associates, a large Los Angeles firm - and when the possibility of becoming a dean at Yale came, it was a very appropriate moment in my life. I was interested in a number of issues that I could not pursue while in a firm like Gruen's.

I believe being president of a private institution is a remarkable experience, but at Ohio State, it's a calling.

I'm often asked by search committees for public and private universities to help them think about how to find their next president.

I'm a professor of economics and associate head of the MIT Department of Economics.

The decline of particle physics in the U.S. is really a symptom of the erratic and sometimes anti-scientific attitudes in Washington and the incompetence of Congress in managing science.

To be a dean, you have to be a salesman as well as a scholar.

Creating a global platform for collaboration in education research and innovation has been the PISA initiative's aspiration from its conception in the late 1990s.

We must establish all over the country schools of our own to train our own children to become scientists, to become mathematicians. We must realize the need for adult education and for job retraining programs that will emphasize a changing society in which automation plays the key role. We intend to use the tools of education to help raise our people to an unprecedented level of excellence and self respect through their own efforts.

Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.

Science is an investigation," Coach said, sanding his hands together. "Science requires us to transform into spies." Put that way, science almost sounded fun. But I'd been in Coach's class long enough not to get my hopes up.

Poverty is not created by poor people. It is produced by our failure to create institutions to support human capabilities.

The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance but to overcome it.

Literacy is not the end of education nor even the beginning.