I once thought that there was some chance that a Harvard professor would know something about politics.
Economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality
When we routinely fail to produce the new knowledge policy makers desperately need, they lose confidence in us. Who can blame them? Smart guesses aren’t worth spit.
As a physicist, I can state that none of the 18 physicists who signed the Statement works in this field; nor to my knowledge has ever published a paper on this subject.
He is a third rate Western lawyer…they take a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar and whose speeches are illiterate compositions…interlarded with coarse and clumsy jokes.
In academics, it's getting your voice out that's important. It's getting somebody to listen to you. I had no problem with that. People were always curious about what I had to say.
For many decades now - and certainly during my adult life in academe - the Western intellectual world has not been convinced that theology is a pursuit that can be engaged in with intellectual honesty and integrity.
I can assure everyone that there is no academic fraud as it relates to my college transcript. I took every course with qualified members of the UNC faculty and I earned every grade whether it was good or bad.
There's nothing more distasteful than an academic having to, like, trot out his credentials. You really come off as a jerk when you do that.
I think a lot of journal articles should really be blogs.
There are very few critics who have historical context or authority.
No academic ever expects to be taken seriously by more than three other people, because really, we write for three people in our field.
Unfortunately, proof of a Jefferson-Hemings liaison was as fanciful as Professor Ellis' war service.
If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.
I don't need to be validated by academia, because that presupposes that academia is a pure endeavor and not guided by market forces, which is not the case.
I'm going to prove I belong. There's a lot of skepticism about the type of player I am, where I come from, the University of Wyoming, obviously.
Niall Ferguson is an intellectual fraud whose job, for years, has been to impress dumb, rich Americans with his accent and flatter them with his writings.
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.
We are making sure that the courses we offer at MITx and HarvardX are quintessential MIT and Harvard courses. They are not watered down. They are not MIT Lite or Harvard Lite. These are hard courses. These are the exact same courses, so the certificate will mean something.
In an ideal world, you might imagine that scientific papers were only cited by academics on the basis of their content. This might be true. But lots of other stuff can have an influence.
Only when he has published his ideas and findings has the scientist made his contribution, and only when he has thus made it part of the public domain of scholarship can he truly lay claim to it as his own. For his claim resides only in the recognition accorded by peers in the social system of science through reference to his work.
Unfortunately, a lot of economists wanted to make their subject a science. So the more what you do resembles physics or chemistry, the more credible you become.
In the wake of the Great Recession, we talked a lot about whether economists and their theories were afforded too much credence, but as far as I can tell there has been no similarly critical public discourse about academic history. But there ought to be. Just as economists became a sort of priestly order that we relied upon to tell us how to achieve prosperity and distribute resources in society, historians have become a sort of priestly order that we rely on to tell us about where our politics are headed and how we should think about our sense of nationhood.
Having a Nobel Prize or being a famous scientist will get you a week to a week and a half, metaphorically speaking, of a hearing for your new idea, but after that, it's going to tank if you don't have the evidence and support for it.
In the mainstream, I'm suspect because I'm black. I have dreadlocks, I have a goatee. I mean, I'm just suspect. In my classroom and at Columbia, I'm not as suspect because it's clear I know what I'm doing, but I am still suspect.
