Academic Administration Quotes

My father was a headmaster in England and then the dean of a college in Australia. We moved there when I was about five, so my education was in Australia, and I always felt I was Australian even though my passport was British.

The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme,--a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection,--to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation,... and for these oversights successive generations have to pay.

I joke that being a university president is akin to being a pinata. But there are also notions of redemption.

I had come from Los Angeles - I had been there a partner of Gruen Associates, a large Los Angeles firm - and when the possibility of becoming a dean at Yale came, it was a very appropriate moment in my life. I was interested in a number of issues that I could not pursue while in a firm like Gruen's.

I was a teacher and an administrator at Parson's School of Design, and as an administrator, I was associate dean. And in that role, I went around fixing things that were broken. And the Parson's fashion program was broken.So fashion chose me. It needed to be developed and evolve. I don't know if it comes naturally to anyone.

Art school is a very difficult thing to run in a generous, humane way, because academic power is somehow very corrupting.

To be a dean, you have to be a salesman as well as a scholar.

I served seven years as the chair of the Princeton economics department where I had responsibility for major policy decisions, such as whether to serve bagels or doughnuts at the department coffee hour.

In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.

It is of course true that many of our universities are large and complex organisations, requiring highly skilled individuals to run them effectively.

I'm a psychologist. I was a psychology faculty member, and then I became an administrator of the department, then the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. At the time of the presidential search, I was the dean.

The people who run a university are far more qualified and intelligent in handling people than someone who inherited his money and used it to buy a pro team.

After forty years in the lab, I was asked in 1991 to become president of The Rockefeller University. Unlike a working scientist, being president for seven years provided an opportunity to interact with scientists in many different fields and broadened my scope of the natural sciences.

I believe being president of a private institution is a remarkable experience, but at Ohio State, it's a calling.

This line of research continued when I went, and brought my research group with me, to the new University of California, Irvine campus in 1966 to become the founding Dean of the School of Physical Sciences.

At best, most college presidents are running something that is somewhere between a faltering corporation and a hotel.

American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.

Educational bureaucracies dull a child's questing sensitivity.

I recognized that teaching and research institutions vitally depend on the involvement of active scientists also in management functions.

A young professor I watched in action at one of our large eastern colleges used to stand with his back to the class and mumble explanations of blackboard problems. He was "let out" at the end of two years because students refused to attend his classes. He was given an evasive reason for his dismissal and he left with justifiable bitterness toward the administration. If someone had told him the truth he could have avoided this denouement. Sometimes professors go on for years without any conception of remediable faults which irritate their listeners.

I'm often asked by search committees for public and private universities to help them think about how to find their next president.

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

The vast majority of people in academia, especially at the administrative level, have so little confidence in their ability to make an argument for their liberal cause, they choose to keep conservatives from making their own case at all. It's pathetic, cowardly, unconstitutional and completely predictable.

The School of the Art Institute is an extraordinary teaching institution by the fact that it believes that active studio artists are good teachers. That may seem an obvious statement, but in higher education, it is often the student's course evaluations that win the day with administrators.

In a large university, there are as many deans and executive heads as there are schools and departments. Their relations to one another are intricate and periodic; in fact, "galaxy" is too loose a term: it is a planetarium of deans with the President of the University as a central sun. One can see eclipses, inner systems, and oppositions.