Quotes about Academic Intimidation

Ben Shapiro

By giving professors jobs for life, universities create a feeling of unanswerable power among too many. Tenured professors who are uninterested in serving the student body are less likely to respond favorably to criticism, and are more likely to feel the freedom to intimidate or harass those with opposing viewpoints.

Per Petterson

At first I wanted to go to university, but I really didn't dare to. I was too self-conscious, being a working-class kid. It was really difficult. I was going to study history, but the professor asked me some questions I didn't understand, and I didn't dare to ask what they meant. I left university and went to work in the Post.

Elisabeth Shue

Today I still feel like the most illiterate person ever to have roamed the campuses of Wellesley and Harvard, where I later transferred. I remain intimidated by all the books I haven't read, but over the years I've come to realize that being a student is a lifelong adventure.

Matthew Pearl

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.

Gary Hamel

I'm not one of those professors whose office is encased floor-to-ceiling with books. By the way, I think academics do this to intimidate their visitors.

Jesmyn Ward

I dabbled in writing, wrote really bad poetry in high school. I also took a few writing classes when I was an undergrad at Stanford. I was so intimidated.

Evan Esar

A lecturer often makes you feel dumb at one end and numb at the other.

Bashir Assad

It is well known that Iraq has the greatest number of scientists, who are among the best in the Arab world. They are being assassinated systematically. We are not allowed to have minds and to progress.

This quotation illustrates the extreme naivety of some of the Muslim leaders. He and many Muslims actually believe that America and the West are out to assassinate Muslim scientists to prevent Islam from advancing. This is a convenient rationale for the poor scientific level of achievement in modern Islamic cultures. Bashar and other conspiracy theorists pay little attention to the many Muslim scientists who have been and are being trained in American, French, English and other country’s universities. Muslims attend the same classes and learn from the same professors as Western students. None get assassinated. Sectarian violence of Iraq Sunni and Shiite Muslims against each other has tragically taken the lives of some scientists. Almost 1000 years ago Islam and the Arabs had many of the great scientists of the world, but the intellectual stagnation brought about by extreme Islamic fundamentalism curtailed their technical development.

Academic Intimidation Quotes