Michael Dirda Quotes

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years.

All I wanted was to be a university teacher.

I became an academic so that I could share my knowledge and experience with students.

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

I mean, part of me would love to be a fat tenured professor of theater someday.

Doctoral training is devoted almost entirely to learning to do research, even though most Ph.Ds who enter academic life spend far more time teaching than they do conducting experiments or writing books.

I served as Dean until 1974, when I stepped down to return to full time teaching and research.

No, I'm happy to go on living the life I've chosen. I'm a university teacher and I like my job.

Teaching physics at the University, and more general lecturing to wider audiences has been a major concern.

A professorship appeals very much because I enjoy being with younger people.

My grandmother wanted my father to be a teacher because she was a teacher. He didn't go down that road until much later in life; he just kind of retired after almost 20 years as being a visiting lecturer at Stanford, where he got his graduate degree.

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

I could have seen myself going into academia, but I don't love it; I just like it.

I was on the mathematics faculty at M.I.T. from 1951 through until I resigned in the spring of 1959.

Colleges and classrooms should be havens of tranquility, places where thoughtful discussions occur, where students work together with their teachers to acquire knowledge of the arts and sciences.

I was born in Norway, and when I was little I went to live in Detroit, Michigan. My father was a professor of philosophy at Wayne University, and my mother was also a teacher.

I'm an academic. I teach at the university, and that's where I will go back to.

I obtained a job at the Library of Congress. I loved books, so I felt at home. I was going to end up, I thought, majoring in English and teach at the college level.

America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.

It's tempting to say the Ph.D. didn't have an effect, but it's not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way.

I would have liked to have been a professor of sociology.

I now teach at American University and the University of Virginia.

I then moved to the University of Western Ontario where I was made a full professor in 1985.

College is a refuge from hasty judgment.