Henry Giroux Quotes

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

It is the goal of the American university to be the brains of the republic.

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

There are quite a lot of YouTube clips of me that have gone viral. One that I think of is of a young woman at a lecture I was giving - she came from Liberty University, which is a ludicrous religious institution. She said, 'What if you are wrong?' and I answered that rather briefly, and that's gone viral.

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.

As Oscar Wilde should have said, when bad ideas have nowhere else to go, they emigrate to America and become university courses.

I found university a little dispiriting. I thought I would enter the great halls of Plato, but instead I entered the halls of an intellectual sausage factory. I wanted to do something not on the main course, and chose the environment.

College is a refuge from hasty judgment.

I was fortunate in that I attended university in Canada in the early 1970s when you could take a true liberal arts degree with no programmes, majors or minors.

I feel lucky in that I don't really have to go to college to study something job-specific. I just want to go to learn about what is interesting to me and learn about the classes that you don't really get to take in high school because you have to take the basics.

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

One of the things that really drove me crazy was the way in which college kids, in particular, are educated to think that ideology is dangerous and bad.

Universities are in a position where they can think very creatively.

The goal of higher education should be to champion the airing of all honest viewpoints. Nothing less is acceptable.

A truly great university is a nucleus of artistic expression. It fosters creative, critical thought, and serves as a platform for civil discourse.

That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian.

There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism.

The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination.

I wanted to go to a liberal arts college, I wanted to have that experience.

I almost got a psychology degree, I almost got a philosophy degree. I kept changing it so they couldn't make me graduate. I studied anthropology and eastern religion, epistomology, and astronomy... I took every interesting course I could find for nine years.

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.

Higher education has never been economically self-supporting; it has hardly ever been fully organized from public funds; everywhere it has remained parasitic on the private munificence of wealthy persons. The peril is too obvious to need further enforcement: it is the hand of the prospective, the potential donor that fetters intellectual freedom in our colleges, and will do so more and more so long as the duty of organizing public higher education for a nation out of public funds fails of recognition..

College professors are suspect because whenever emotion is in control, anti-intellectualism prevails.

A university is a place that is established and will function for the benefit of society provided it is a center of independent thought.

The University is not engaged in making ideas safe for students. It is engaged in making students safe for ideas. Thus it permits the freest expression of views before students, trusting to their good sense in passing judgment on these views. Only in this way can it best serve American democracy.