Pankaj Mishra Quotes

I don't see myself in an ivory tower.

A preoccupation with theory has been a defensive response by academic biographers in this country, I submit, to the condescension of traditional humanists and social scientists pervading higher education for many years.

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

When the fabric of the universe becomes unknown, it is the duty of the university to produce weavers.

Cambridge is one of the best universities in the world, especially in my field.

Since its founding in 1854, Penn State has proven to be a leading institution of higher learning.

I don't think I could have thought of any place other than Stanford to leave Harvard for.

As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation.

The atmosphere of libraries, lecture rooms and laboratories is dangerous to those who shut themselves up in them too long. It separates us from reality like a fog.

There is no greater way to ensure that universities remain a hotbed of leftist thought than to guarantee that professors knight their own successors. But that's basically how the Ph.D. system works, with sitting professors approving the work of would-be professors.

I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.

My parents didn't go to university and weren't brought up in England. They hadn't heard of any other universities other than 'Cambridge' or 'Oxford.'

I've gotten e-mails asking, 'Are you taking students?' Well, come visit and I'll be happy to talk to you. But I'm not a degree-granting institution.

I had left teaching, which I enjoyed, because I realized I couldn't get tenure at a research university.

Some people stay in the academic world just to avoid becoming self-aware. You can quote me on that.

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

Harvard was also a little bit of a villain in my first book, 'The Dante Club.' I guess there might be a way to make Harvard more of a sympathetic presence, but it's such a powerful institution that it more naturally lends itself toward not necessarily a negative but an obstructionist element in a story.

Would physics at Geneva be as good as physics at Harvard? I think not. Rome? I think not. In Britain, I don't think there is one place, neither Cambridge nor Oxford, which can compare with Harvard.

My father was a graduate student at Oxford in the early 1960s, where the conventions and etiquette of clothing were crucial to the pervasive class consciousness of the place and time.

Academia is a rarified culture, especially an Ivy League academic background.

Black professors make more than white professors. That's because we are in demand. I'll tell you, give me two blacks in institutions of higher learning, one has a Ph.D. from an elite institution and has a certain publication record. You give me a white scholar with the same credentials, and I will take that black scholar.

Class division in knowledge goes deeper than any other class division.

In this respect, higher education is now causing most of the growing inequality and strengthening class structure of the United States.

Maryland is one of the greatest schools that we have in this country.

Social networks matter greatly, and our class calibrations are often around what college one attended, leading to gruesome institutional divisions between those who attend, say, community colleges and those who attend top-tier universities.