Academic Exchange Quotes

Harvard is first and foremost a university and not a consulting operation, and our job here is to teach and to research and to create knowledge on Asia in conjunction and in cooperation with scholars as well as with political, intellectual, and cultural leaders in Asia.

When I first started working at MIT, back in the '80s, our writing department had a joint cocktail party with the Harvard writing department. It was kind of oil-and-water.

We want to encourage foreign students to come to our universities - to study, research and teach.

In 1989, I had a fellowship to teach for Yale in China for two years. I came back from California to New Haven to spend the summer learning Chinese, but because of Tiananmen Square, Yale cancelled the program.

I hope to see the bringing together of all the best educated people of the earth into a worldwide Congress of Scientists.

I moved to MIT from Stanford in 1984 to teach, and became the founding director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.

One scientist will interpret data one way, another in another way. One scientist may feel that an experiment is valid, another feels it's invalid. That's why scientists have discussions and put forward their opinions in conferences and papers.

In 1922, I got a small stipend from the Swedish-American Foundation and went to Cambridge, England, for a few months and thereafter to Harvard University. In the summer, Cambridge was rather empty, but I am grateful for many pleasant talks about economics with Austin Robinson who, in the summer of 1922, seemed to be about as lonely as I was.

In 1973, I left the Rockefeller University to join the Yale University Medical School. The main reason for the move was my belief that the time had come for fruitful interactions between the new discipline of Cell Biology and the traditional fields of interest of medical schools, namely Pathology and Clinical Medicine.

There's a real difference of what one believed was one's chief responsibility between American professors and Chinese professors. This was vividly revealed to me when I compared what I could learn in Chicago and what I could learn in China.

When I came to MIT, there were four rubrics: science, art, design, and technology. And as you entered your degree, whether it was a master's or a Ph.D., if you were a citizen in one domain, you were a traveler in the other.

I lived in L.A. for a year when I was four - my dad was doing a sabbatical at UCLA - so it always remained quite a familiar place.

When I visit universities in the U.A.E., the U.S. and across Europe, I see the faces of the leaders of tomorrow.

Universities have a big role to play... making it very clear to their counterparts, their networks, that the U.K. is not walking away from the world. We still value multilateral cooperation, we still see the EU as a significant partner.

I am happy that I have so many friends all over the world who contributed to my research work, and I believe that also in the future, basic research offers the best opportunity of reaching across borders and overcoming ideological barriers.

When I was at U.C.L.A., I decided I was going to go to Japan and learn Japanese.

On this basis, which was originally financial and goes back to George Peabody, there grew up in the twentieth century a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy.

The universities have got a job here as well in making sure that people actually understand that we're open for university students coming into the U.K. There's a job here not just for the government, I think there's a job for the universities as well to make sure that people know that we are open.

Medical engineering is one of the areas in which the traditional 'silo' structures of university disciplines have not encouraged collaboration.

Keeping with our family tradition of sending their children abroad for a couple of years, and aware of my interest in chemistry, I was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland when I was 11 years old, on the assumption that German was an important language for a prospective chemist to learn.

While we should certainly be investing in our own STEM education, we should take advantage of the thousands of international students who come here to study and are ready to fill these gaps immediately upon graduation.

My enthusiasm for L.A. stems from my father, who was a lecturer in American literature at the University of Birmingham. Through his work, our family did several house swaps with L.A. families. It was a dreadfully daring thing to do in the early 1980s; there was no Internet, so you had no idea of what you were getting into.

What students lack in school is an intellectual relationship or conversation with the teacher.

There is nothing obscure about the objectives of educational exchange. Its purpose is to acquaint Americans with the world as it is and to acquaint students and scholars from many lands with America as it is-not as we wish it were or as we might wish foreigners to see it, but exactly as it is-which by my reckoning is an "image" of which no American need be ashamed.

Part of China's strategic planning is to make their universities among the top level of the world, and I think they understand you can't do that without the adoption of some of the principles of the great universities in the West; one of those is the ability to have free expression and discussion in the classroom.