Lamar Alexander Quotes

I think higher education is over-regulated.

I think it's very important to emphasize that there are many, many different educational institutions in what we call higher education, and they educate an enormous diversity of students. I think all of those institutions have to define particular roles for themselves; they can't do everything at once.

I think, my own personal view is there should be higher and higher levels of autonomy; government should not interfere in setting up colleges, in running colleges. The market, the society will decide which is a good university, which is not a good university, rather than government mandating.

The $100,000,000 which have been expended in the late Mexican War, would have been sufficient to found 126 free Colleges, each as richly endowed as Harvard University - Library, Professorships, scientific schools and all. If sums of money were thus liberally expended, and for education and its appliances, instead of war and its horrible enginery, who can estimate the happy results which would be the fruit of such policy?

If I went to any other college, I probably would have been pre-med. But I felt like I had freedom to do what I wanted to do at Harvard.

Opportunity expands when there is excellence and choice in education.

I am not fully informed of the practices at Harvard, but there is one from which we shall certainly vary, although it has been copied, I believe, by nearly every college and academy in the United States. That is, the holding the students all to one prescribed course of reading, and disallowing exclusive application to those branches only which are to qualify them for the particular vocations to which they are destined. We shall, on the contrary, allow them uncontrolled choice in the lectures they shall choose to attend, and require elementary qualification only, and sufficient age.

Many kids think unless they go to one of these great Ivy League schools, which I was lucky enough to go to later, that they won't get the same kind of learning. But I learned just the opposite lesson; that my best teachers were not at Harvard University.

The advocates of the higher education of the Negro would be the last to deny the incompleteness and glaring defects of the present system: too many institutions have attempted to do college work, the work in some cases has not been thoroughly done, and quantity rather than quality has sometimes been sought. But all this can be said of higher education throughout the land.

Universities are good at long term thinking. Of the 85 institutions in the world that were in existence 500 years ago, 70 of them are universities.

When Harvard University opened its doors in 1636, there were already well-established Universities in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru.

There were Indians at Harvard College in the 1600s.

I...distinctly stated to you that...I held it an incumbent duty of every officer of the Institution to abstain from any act tending to bring within its walls discussions upon questions on which the passions and interests of the community are divided, and warmly engaged

… colleges are indoctrination mills that harm the country.

… the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions…. Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace.

The student protests of the 1960s were partly the outcome of the hypertrophy of the university and the resulting shortcoming in higher education.

When they [students] select a college which has published its requirements, they elect to do what it prescribes for the attainment of a degree – and, perchance, an education.

You are not stepchildren of Brown. On the contrary, you have been favored by a radical and, to many, unbelievable change in policy. ... You are students in Brown University; you have open to you all its educational facilities ... you are meeting regular curricular requirements

I once thought that there was some chance that a Harvard professor would know something about politics.

By the time they are 21 years of age they are almost ready to leave college and have been subjected to the corrosive influence and brainwashing of ultra-liberal and radical professors.

If we could create higher education from scratch, would we have organizations that divide people by race, class and gender at institutions that are supposed to be encouraging diversity? No!

Taxpayers, lawmakers and donors need to wake from the spell cast by American universities’ past glory. Only then can they summon the courage to withdraw funding and force the necessary change: replacing faux-academic political activists with real academic thinkers—people who care about original thought, not peddling an ideology.

Universities used to be places where the major political and social issues of the day could be researched and debated. The results of this careful thought and analysis were used to make political debates in the wider world more realistic and better informed. All that has now been turned on its head. The campus offers not a reasoned corrective to partisan passions, but fierce, one-sided advocacy of dangerous and destructive ideas.

If they want to go to college and then leave, let them leave when they want to leave. Why would we force a kid to stay? 'Well - it's good for the game?' It's about these kids and their families.

American colleges are now increasingly reflexive in maintaining politically correct dialogue over controversy, and some say universities have lost sight of education's ultimate purpose.