Best 63 quotes in «academics quotes» category

The universities are an absolute wreck right now, because for decades, any graduate student in the humanities who had independent thinking was driven out. There was no way to survive without memorizing all these stupid bromides with this referential bowing to these over-inflated figures like Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and so on. Basically, it's been a tyranny in the humanities, because the professors who are now my age – who are the baby boomer professors, who made their careers on the back of Foucault and so on – are determined that that survive. So you have a kind of vampirism going on. So I've been getting letters for 25 years since Sexual Personae was released in 1990, from refugees from the graduate schools. It's been a terrible loss. One of my favorite letters was early on: a woman wrote to me, she was painting houses in St. Louis, she said that she had wanted a career as a literature professor and had gone into the graduate program in comparative literature at Berkeley. And finally, she was forced to drop out because, she said, every time she would express enthusiasm for a work they were studying in the seminar, everyone would look at her as if she had in some way created a terrible error of taste. I thought, 'Oh my God', see that's what's been going on – a pretentious style of superiority to the text. [When asked what can change this]: Rebellion! Rebellion by the grad students. This is what I'm trying to foment. We absolutely need someone to stand up and start criticizing authority figures. But no; this generation of young people have been trained throughout middle school and high school and college to be subservient to authority.

They are suspicious of humanism, nervous about too much style, and wary of public celebrations of the personal.

They were really willing to pay to avoid any trouble. No doubt they had overestimated the ability of academics to make a nuisance of themselves. It had been years since an academic title gained you access to major media.... Even if all the university professors in France had risen up in protest, almost nobody would have noticed, but apparently they hadn't found that out in Saudi Arabia. They still believed, deep down, in the power of the intellectual elite. It was almost touching.

This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘serious’ courses replete with ‘trends ’ and ‘schools ’ and ‘myths ’ and ‘symbols ’ and ‘social comment ’ and something unspeakably spooky called ‘climate of thought.’ Actually these ‘serious’ courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books.

This is not education my friend. It is a process of manufacturing computation devices that look like Homo sapiens, and thereby falsely labeled as Education.

...tilstaaer jeg gierne, at Charactererne ere outrerede udi visse Stykker; men maa derhos sige, at Agt er skeed af heel beraad Hu, og af en pur Fornødenhed, saasom jeg saavel som andre af Erfarenhed haver mærket, at Skuespill uden outrerede Characterer, eller uden det, som Academiske Censores ansee som Feil, ingen Virkning have.

Through most of human history, our ancestors had children shortly after puberty, just as the members of all nonhuman species do to this day. Whether we like the idea or not, our young ancestors must have been capable of providing for their offspring, defending their families from predators, cooperating with others, and in most other respects functioning fully as adults. If they couldn't function as adults, their young could not have survived, which would have meant the swift demise of the human race. The fact that we're still here suggests that most young people are probably far more capable than we think they are. Somewhere along the line, we lost sight of – and buried – the potential of our teens.

To a scholar, mathematics is music.

To be a scholar study math, to be a smart study magic.

To sustain the value of education, students should be respected as much as the teachers.

To teachers, education is just a duty, but to students, it's their right.

What music is to the heart, mathematics is to the mind.

Tun? Wir sind das wichtigste magische Bildungsinstitut!", betonte Ridcully. "Aber lehren wir?" "Nur wenn uns nichts anderes übrig bleibt", sagte der Dekan. "Wir zeigen den Studenten, wo die Bibliothek ist, plaudern ein wenig mit ihnen und promovieren die Überlebenden. Wenn sie auf Probleme stoßen, steht meine Tür in metaphorischer Hinsicht immer für sie offen." "In metaphorischer Hinsicht?", wiederholte Ponder. "Ja. In Wirklichkeit ist sie natürlich verschlossen." "Erklär ihm, dass wir nichts tun, Stibbons", verlangte der Dozent für neue Runen. "Wir sind Akademiker.

You'd expect academics, people who are by training comfortable with complexity, to be the most resistant to the idea that we're shaped by any single factor. In fact, they are often the worst offenders. Immersed in their own research, shaped by their own work, many logically see everything else as a natural extension of it.

You may no longer be in school, but you must never stop learning. We need to be as smart as the white ghosts.

A student who has no study skills is like a person with a driving license but can’t drive.

Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister.

Always lend a helping hand, for one day- YOU might be the one reaching for it!

Your ability to sort answers for your questions help you for a better job.

As the physicist Murray Gell-Mann once remarked: “Faculty members are familiar with a certain kind of person who looks to the mathematicians like a good physicist and looks to the physicists like a good mathematician. Very properly, they do not want that kind of person around.

Be curious about what are the people doing around you in your filed and others fields around you.

Finally, I have a voice. After years of abuse, harassment, lies, incompetence, and threats, I have a voice. The voice of an American teacher.

Bring 'em in stupid, send them away clever, that's the UU way!

But I know I didn't love school for school's sake. I had never really been what people call an 'academic' person, nor did I see myself becoming one. Instead, I took pleasure in the fact that my work existed in a social setting, one that was based on the promise of a brighter future. I knew that what I adored about school was that each of my assignments - readings, essays, or in-class presentations - was inseparable from my relationships [...] If I loved school at all, I loved it for what it provided me access to: bonds with people I grew to cherish. And nothing was better than working toward my dreams alongside people I loved who were doing the same.

Education is not merely meant for you to write and pass exams, get a good job and a good spouse, and settle down for survival.

Education makes your maths better, not necessarily your manners.

being genius does not necessarily means knowing it all or having the highest academic qualification but a persons ability to apply wisdom and common sense to common things in a distinctive manner and courageously exhibiting the latent deft to the admiration of the masses

Either Ault was a lot harder than my junior high had been, or I was getting dumber- I suspected both. If I wasn't literally getting dumber, I knew at least that I'd lost the glow that surrounds you when the teachers think you're one of the smart, responsible ones, that glow that shines brighter every time you raise your hand in class to say the perfect thing, or you run out of room in a blue book during an exam and have to ask for a second one.

For every group, malevolence is always somewhere else. Maybe we understand at this point in history that it can occur at night in darkened rooms where small children sleep. However, surely not in academia. Surely lying and deception do not occur among people who go to conferences, who write books, who testify in court, and who have PhDs. At one point I complained to a Florida judge that I was astonished to an expert witness lying on the stand [about child sexual abuse research]. I thought one had to tell the truth in court. I thought if someone didn't, she didn't get her milk and cookies. I thought God came down and plucked someone right out of the witness stand if he lied in court. I thought a lying expert witness would step out of court and get hit by a bus. A wiser woman than I, the judge's answer was, “Silly you." Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learned Author: Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998

Have you noticed how the cleverest people at school are not those who make it in life? People who are conventionally clever get jobs on their qualifications (the past), not on their desire to succeed (the future). Very simply, they get overtaken by those who continually strive to be better than they are.

Fortunately, our colleges and universities are fully cognizant of the problems I have been delineating and take concerted action to address them. Curricula are designed to give coherence to the educational experience and to challenge students to develop a strong degree of moral awareness. Professors, deeply involved with the enterprise of undergraduate instruction, are committed to their students' intellectual growth and insist on maintaining the highest standards of academic rigor. Career services keep themselves informed about the broad range of postgraduate options and make a point of steering students away from conventional choices. A policy of noncooperation with U.S. News has taken hold, depriving the magazine of the data requisite to calculate its rankings. Rather than squandering money on luxurious amenities and exorbitant administrative salaries, schools have rededicated themselves to their core missions of teaching and the liberal arts. I'm kidding, of course.

Having spent all my life among academics, I can tell you that hearing how wrong they area is about as high on their priority list as finding a cockroach in their coffee. The typical scientist has made an interesting discovery early on in his or her career, followed by a lifetime of making sure that everyone else admires his or her contribution and that no one questions it. There is no poorer company than an aging scientist who has failed to achieve these objectives.

I have never compromised on academics and the one thing that I insist on is good grades, even though I am a relaxed and indulgent parent in most other things.

I am successful because of my brains and my guts, put together, and I don't need some fancy-ass degree from a bunch of sweater-vest-wearing pricks who haven't gotten laid since Bush Senior was president... Do you know who studies sociology? People who would rather observe life than live it.

If only we were all better educated. If then, higher education would at last be a journey for skill and knowledge rather than for power and status.

If you have nothing to do, Go sleep.

I had good intentions once upon a time. Well, September.

...In primary school, sports day was the one day of the year when the less academically gifted students could triumph...As if a silver in the egg-and-spoon race was some sort of compensation for not understanding how to use an apostrophe

I'm not one of those academics that don't do shit but reads about it. The difference is, I do shit. I have a proof of concept and it works.

I think her favorite thing about our . . . collaboration was her actor and musician friends rubbing shoulders with my academic colleagues, she liked the atmosphere of challenge, the way anything that came under discussion could be claimed or rejected by either side. Time and time again the power of an idea or a piece of art was assessed by either its beauty or its technique or its usefulness, and time and time again my wife was surprised by how rarely anything on earth satisfies all three camps.

Intellect without implementation is ignorance, not intelligence.

... I succeeded at math, at least by the usual evaluation criteria: grades. Yet while I might have earned top marks in geometry and algebra, I was merely following memorized rules, plugging in numbers and dutifully crunching out answers by rote, with no real grasp of the significance of what I was doing or its usefulness in solving real-world problems. Worse, I knew the depth of my own ignorance, and I lived in fear that my lack of comprehension would be discovered and I would be exposed as an academic fraud -- psychologists call this "imposter syndrome".

Mathematics is not just a subject of education system, it is the soul of education system.

It’s the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him.

It was a time when a degree was expected but not much respected.

Make your education valuable. Apply what you learnt. Refuse to take the back seat and watch things happen. Join the change and be part of the change.

Not to judge too quickly while you are in a new language of work.

Now, on his way to another lecture, the very thought of entering a room full of students, who still thought it was possible to learn all about something, made him yawn.

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses — especially the older ones — functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn't last a week in GenPop.

Perhaps, I suggested, the fate of the universe could briefly take second place to the thorny issue of graduating with honours? He blew loudly between his lips, a liquid sound of contempt. “That,” he exclaimed, “is precisely what’s wrong with academics.