Nicholas Negroponte Quotes

The Wellcome Foundation offered me the chance to establish a small academic research unit, modestly funded, but with total independence. The real opportunity, however, came from King's College, London.

Great research universities must insist on independence from government and on the exercise of academic freedom.

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

A university's essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism - a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.

The principle of academic freedom is designed to make sure that powers outside the university, including government and corporations, are not able to control the curriculum or intervene in extra-mural speech.

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.

To the extent that tenure supports academic freedom, I support tenure. I want no person or system to have any power, real or apparent, to chill academic freedom.

I don't accept the argument of people like David Horowitz that the government should impose some sort of predetermined political balance on academic research.

The partisanship which, as a rule, dominates all appointments here renders any governmental agent unfit to tamper with ... [universities], for partisanship seeks to manipulate every thing for personal or party advantage and does nothing, intentionally, for such abstractions as civilization and culture.

No student who shall be expelled from a university by a decision of the university senate which was ratified or prompted by the agent of the government, or who shall have left the institution in order to escape expulsion, shall be received in any other university... .

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

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

I'm a professor of economics and associate head of the MIT Department of Economics.

A university is supposed to be a place where all ideas are discussed.

I'd require that every university, public or private, be governed by the constitutional standards regarding freedom of expression and due process. There is no reason for treating adult college students any differently in the university setting than in the outside world.

With the corporatization and privatization of higher education, it is increasingly more difficult for colleges and universities to expand and deepen democratic public life, produce engaged critical citizens, and operate as democratic public spheres.

The pursuit of science, the study of the great works, the value of free inquiry, in short, the very idea of living the life of the mind - yes, these formative and abiding principles of higher education in America had their first and firmest advocate, and their greatest embodiment, in a tall, fair-headed, friendly man who watched this university take form from the mountainside where he lived, the university whose founding he called a crowning achievement to along and well-spent life.

Universities are less constrained by authority and rigid doctrine in the United States than in most other societies, to my knowledge.

It would be foolish and wrong to ignore the fact that all our universities today tread a very dangerous path. Increasingly, they are accepting government money because they are doing things that government wants done. How great a peril is this in a democracy?

The current siege on higher education, whether through defunding education, eliminating tenure, tying research to military needs, or imposing business models of efficiency and accountability, poses a dire threat not only to faculty and students who carry the mantle of university self-governance, but also to democracy itself.

No university ought to be merely a national institution....The universities should have their common ideals, they should have their common obligations toward each other. They should be independent of the governments of the countries in which they are situated. They should not be institutions for the training of an efficient bureaucracy, or for equipping scientists to get the better of foreign scientists; they should stand for the preservation of learning, for the pursuit of truth, and in so far as men are capable of it, the attainment of wisdom.

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.

Where suspicion fills the air and holds scholars in line for fear of their jobs, there can be no exercise of the free intellect. Supineness and dogmatism take the place of inquiry. A problem can no longer be pursued to its edges. Fear stalks the classroom. The teacher is no longer a stimulant to adventurous thinking; she becomes instead a pipe line for safe and sound information. A deadening dogma takes the place of free inquiry. Instruction tends to become sterile; pursuit of knowledge is discouraged; discussion often leaves off where it should begin.

A true university can never rest upon the will of one man. A true university always rests upon the wills of many divergent-minded old men, who refuse to be disturbed, but who growl in their kennels.

Campuses that were once havens of free speech are now patrolled and regulated by thought police. Intellectual dishonesty has become a job requirement for university administrators.