Hal Boyle Quotes

If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

Academic experts may not be good at doing what they are experts in themselves, but they are good at explaining the subject matter to others. They write books, teach courses and offer lessons and give steps others can follow.

At Harvard, I got to meet and have dinner with Jamaica Kincaid. Just to have conversations with professors was absolutely amazing.

The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.

Freshly minted Ph.Ds typically teach the way their favorite professors taught.

Courses on historical methodology are not worth the time that they take up. I shall never give one myself, and I have observed that many of my colleagues who do give such courses refrain from exemplifying their methods by writing anything.

Want to know the best thing about being a professor? Colored chalk.

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

One very clear memory I have of college is that I never learned anything in the big lectures. I have a feeling I'd have done even worse if they'd been on a laptop screen.

I'm used to teaching classes in the dark.

There is an intellectual snobbery that, regrettably, many academics suffer from. They are proud their paper is only read by a small group of people - makes it very exclusive. Let's get rid of that. If it's truly important, people should be excited about it.

College is a place where a professor's lecture notes go straight to the students' lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.

Thoroughly to teach another is the best way to learn for yourself.

To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.

When one's function is to teach the loftiest wisdom, it is difficult to resist the temptation to believe that until you have spoken, nothing has been said.

Academical disputation gives vigor and briskness to the mind thus exercised, and relieves the languor of private study and meditation.

The work of education is divided between the teacher and the environment.

I think even in American schools, they must be studying in a specialized manner.

I suggest to young professors that their first work should be written in a jargon only to be understood by the erudite few. With that behind them, they can ever after say what they have to say in a language 'understand of the people.'

We all know that the real reason universities have students is in order to educate the professors.

Lectures which really teach will never be popular; lectures which are popular will never really teach.

To teach is part of the very fabric of learning.

If you don't set your writing - teaching - at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle.

It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if he will wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius exists there also, but will not answer a call of a committee of the House of Commons. It is rare, precious, eccentric, and darkling.

The instruction at Edinburgh was altogether by lectures, and these were intolerably dull, with the exception of those on chemistry.