Robert M. Hutchins Quotes

We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.

It is the goal of the American university to be the brains of the republic.

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

Universities are the temple through which alone lies the road to that of Liberty.

Universities are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry

A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

A university is a place that is established and will function for the benefit of society provided it is a center of independent thought.

The proper business of a University is ... not to tell us ... what we ought to believe, and make us accept the belief as a duty; but to give us information and training, and help us to form our own beliefs in a manner worthy of intelligent beings.

We must continually remind students in the classroom that expression of different opinions and dissenting ideas affirms the intellectual process. We should forcefully explain that our role is not to teach them to think as we do but rather to teach them, by example, the importance of taking a stance that is rooted in rigorous engagement with the full range of ideas about a topic.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

Universities are basically socialist institutions.

Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.

A university's essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism - a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.

Our universities and museums are respected around the country.

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.

Universities should be safe havens where ruthless examination of realities will not be distorted by the aim to please or inhibited by the risk of displeasure.

Universities are in a position where they can think very creatively.

Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they're here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.

That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian.

Universities are the custodians not only of the many cultures of man, but of the rational process itself.

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.

The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.

College professors are suspect because whenever emotion is in control, anti-intellectualism prevails.

I have been accused of wanting to purge the universities of left wingers. I want to purge the universities of idiots.