Academic Environment Quotes

There are so many things which you do not have to consider if you are developing and studying a theory in a classroom. It is useful to deal with theories in developing youthful minds, for later they will deal with facts and profit by what they have learned of other men's thoughts, but it is quite different to be faced with actual situations that have to be met in one way or another in a given period of time.

I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I think that' for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.

As a former college president, I am well aware that every university is a complicated ecosystem, not a linear widget factory.

If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.

I know I never work in whatever gets called an office, e.g., a school office I use only for meeting students and storing books I know I'm not going to read anytime soon.

I had been an academic all my life. As academics, you tend to believe the smartest people are in academia.

The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music... it is worth anyone's while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything.

All through college, I had frequently been the only girl in a science class - which wasn't such a bad deal.

When I recall my teachers at school, I realise that half of them were abnormal. . . . We pupils of old Austria were brought up to respect old people and women. But on our professors we had no mercy; they were our natural enemies. The majority of them were somewhat mentally deranged, and quite a few ended their days as honest-to-God lunatics! . . . I was in particular bad odor with the teachers. I showed not the slightest aptitude for foreign languages - though I might have, had not the teacher been a congenital idiot. I could not bear the sight of him.

Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.

College had a great deal to do with my development as a person. I don't know if I'd be the artist I was if it wasn't for goin' to school like that. School is a good place - it ain't for everybody, but I think it's for most people.

From your first day at school you are cut off from life to make theories.

I really didn't like the academic structure of science, but I realized I loved science and missed science.

Creative people do not belong in the university because the process is antithetical to the analytical process so necessary for proper scholarship.

I liked the people at Brown, while I really disliked most of the fellow students I had met at Northwestern.

I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people's classes.

There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.

This possibility bothered me as I thought it was not advisable to remain in one academic environment, and the long dark winters in Edinburgh could be rather dismal.

I had considered MIT a place where brilliant people came.

The Cowles Commission was the optimal environment for the type of research that I wanted to do.

At Yale, you can find someone passionate and enthusiastic and involved in just about any issue. For many of us, though, our school's prevailing progressive political atmosphere can make us complacent.

You find your personality real quick in school.

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

I'm an academic. I teach at the university, and that's where I will go back to.