Academic Rivalry Quotes

When I first started working at MIT, back in the '80s, our writing department had a joint cocktail party with the Harvard writing department. It was kind of oil-and-water.

I assume the same problem exists in Australia as in America of back-biting and jealousy and parochialism among disciplines - there are the scientists, and there are the humanities people, and there are chemists and the physicists and everybody snipes at everybody else and inter-disciplinary communication is rare. But it's very precious and necessary.

As a scholarly discipline, economics has always suffered from physics envy.

Mathematicians stand on each others' shoulders and computer scientists stand on each others' toes.

It's not bad at all, getting a Nobel and making so many old fossils explode with rage.

We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try to find something wrong with it.

The seminar in economic theory conducted by Hayek at the L.S.E. in the 1930s was attended, it came to seem, by all of the economists of my generation - Nicky Kaldor , Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jah, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the list could be indefinitely extended. The urge to participate (and correct Hayek) was ruthlessly competitive.

France has a very important relationship with Germany. But that does not mean that we agree about everything or that two of our universities or companies are not going to compete.

I've had my successes and failures. I know many academics in my field loathe me. I've come to loathe them back, as it seems only polite to do so. But at heart it's absurd; we should band together against the big common enemies.

Flatterers and men of learning do not accord well with each other.

Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.

When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.

The great object is to find the theory of the matter [of X-rays] before anyone else, for nearly every professor in Europe is now on the warpath.

I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.

I've whipped the Harvard graduate's ass. Nothing against Harvard - it's a hell of a school - but there I was, twenty five yards behind, wrapped in leg irons, and I beat him.

In order to conquer the world of economics with his new theory, it was critical for Keynes to destroy his rivals within Cambridge itself. In his mind, he who controlled Cambridge controlled the world.

What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford, broadly speaking, is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels impelled to write about it.

The FBI is full of Fordham graduates keeping tabs on Harvard Men in the State Department.

In my experience, academia is a World War 1 kind of a domain, and I do my best to avoid all that trench warfare.

Such is professional jealousy; a scientist will never show any kindness for a theory which he did not start himself. There is no feeling of brotherhood among these people. Indeed, they always resent it when I call them brother. To show how far their ungenerosity can carry them, I will state that I offered to let Prof. H--y publish my great theory as his own discovery; I even begged him to do it; I even proposed to print it myself as his theory. Instead of thanking me, he said that if I tried to fasten that theory on him he would sue me for slander.

Competition in academia is so vicious because the stakes are so small.

Academics are not necessarily nice people.

It was the usual sort of academic battle: footnotes at ten paces, bolstered by snide articles in academic journals and lots of sniping about methodology, a thrust and parry of source and countersource. My sources had to be better.

An Engineer is no match for a Historian with his dander up!

The quarrels of theologians and philosophers have not been about religion, but about philosophy; and philosophers not unfrequently seem to entertain the same feeling toward theologians that sportsmen cherish toward poachers.