Certainly the multicultural activists in the Labour party and the universities wanted to destroy the old white Anglo-Saxon education system as they saw it, and produce something completely different - with no conception of what that completely different thing would be, of course.
Education must be taken out of the hands of rich illiterates, third rate politicians, and put where it belongs: in the care of scholars. At present the whole University system is rotten to the core, and an appalling waste of time, energy and money.
I'm very proud of what we've done with the State University and the City University. They're totally different institutions than they were when I took office.
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.
I think we're vastly over-invested in universities. Universities should be relatively small and provide excellent education and research in a number of specialized areas. I think the vast majority of young people should be going through non-university, post-secondary training.
My great project is to undo the moral and intellectual damage of most universities
There's a lot wrong [with American universities]. I'd remove 3/4 of the faculty - everything but the hard sciences. But nobody's going to do that, so we'll have to live with the defects. It's amazing how wrongheaded [the teaching is]. There is fatal disconnectedness. You have these squirrelly people in each department who don't see the big picture.
In the year 1915 a series of trivial incidents led some Chinese students in Cornell University to take up the question of reforming the Chinese language.
I think the whole system of education would change if I were in charge and had the ability to make changes. I don't think I would keep Princeton exactly being Princeton.
We need to say goodbye to the traditional methodologies of corporate universities.
Even within traditional universities there has always been debate about whether it wouldn't be better to focus on only one course at a time.
