Robert M. Hutchins Quotes

A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.

Universities are the temple through which alone lies the road to that of Liberty.

The proper business of a University is ... not to tell us ... what we ought to believe, and make us accept the belief as a duty; but to give us information and training, and help us to form our own beliefs in a manner worthy of intelligent beings.

The essence of Vanderbilt is still learning, the essence of its outlook is still liberty, and liberty and learning will be and must be the touchstones of Vanderbilt University and of any free university in this country or the world. I say two touchstones, yet they are almost inseparable, inseparable if not indistinguishable, for liberty without learning is always in peril, and learning without liberty is always in vain.

We have therefore decided that in the most pleasant city of Naples there should be teaching of the arts and of all disciplines, so that those who are starved for knowledge will find it in our own kingdom, and will not be forced, in their search for knowledge, to become pilgrims and to beg in foreign lands

Universities are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry

Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.

As Oscar Wilde should have said, when bad ideas have nowhere else to go, they emigrate to America and become university courses.

One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.

That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian.

There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism.

This is an increasingly diversifying society, and people are coming into much closer contact with each other than they ever did. I find that a problem for a university, because bumping up against people who disagree with you is fundamental to the creation of new knowledge. And so universities can't go silent. You can't have a place where it's not permitted to make a certain kind of argument. But you can have a place which forbids epithets to be thrown at people.

A universityeducates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it.

A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and failures, and they are invariably many, it is the best and most benign side of our society insofar as that society aims to cherish the human mind.

We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.

I never let schooling interfere with my education.

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

The value of a good education has never left me.

The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.

All my knowledge comes from research.

If one knows only what one is told, one does not know enough to be able to arrive at a well-balanced decision.

College is a refuge from hasty judgment.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.