My parents, who were both professors at Tsinghua University, hoped that I would follow in their footsteps and become a professor.
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
Actually, the British boarding school experience turns out to be not that exotic.
I want to emphasize the idea of black as intellectuality and conventionality.
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
A true university can never rest upon the will of one man. A true university always rests upon the wills of many divergent-minded old men, who refuse to be disturbed, but who growl in their kennels.
Most subjects at universities are taught for no other purpose than that they may be re-taught when the students become teachers.
In the end I created a career of my own, concentrating on my writing and lecturing, reaching larger audiences than I would had I ended up with tenure and a full teaching load. It was Virginia Woolf who said that it is terrible to be frozen out of a sacred tradition - but even more terrible to be frozen into it.
Our students wanted to know everything: but only the newest theory seemed to them worth bothering with. Knowing nothing of the intellectual achievements of the past, they kept fresh and intact their enthusiasm for 'the latest thing'. Fashion dominated their interest: they valued ideas not for themselves but for the prestige that they could wring from them.
They call Howard University the 'capstone of black education.' Howard was one of the historically black colleges where people want to go and send their children. Both of my grandfathers went through the medical school, and being in D.C., not far from New York City, it was a natural choice for me.
I think the tradition of well-written history hasn't been squashed out of the academic world as much in Britain as it has in the United States.
In the Sanghi family, there is no one who has undertaken intellectual pursuits.
We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries.
Feminism, in all fields, has yet to produce a single scholar of the intellectual rank of scores of these learned men [e.g., Bruno Snell, Albin Lesky, Denys Page] in the German and British academic tradition.
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty's heightening.
A university is a place where ancient tradition thrives alongside the most revolutionary ideas. Perhaps as no other institution, a university is simultaneously committed to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow.
You know, I come from six generations of college graduates.
The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They'll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don't you worry.
Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place. They teach you to be a gentleman there. In the polytechnic they teach you to be an engineer or such like. See?
When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
If you show a poetry professor your shiny new multiple choice teaching technology, he will invite you to exit his office.
Progress is slow partly from mere intellectual inertia. In a subject where there is no agreed procedure for knocking out errors, doctrines have a long life. A professor teaches what he was taught, and his pupils, with a proper respect and reverence for teachers, set up a resistance against his critics for no other reason than that it was he whose pupils they were.
Cambridge was the place for someone from the Colonies or the Dominions to go on to, and it was to the Cavendish Laboratory that one went to do physics.
My rule on honorary degrees has always been to have one more than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
I've been coming to Notre Dame since 1957. This place, this campus, is the closest thing there is to perfection.
