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.
I don't know why I should have to learn Algebra... I'm never likely to go there.
The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.
The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.
Students now see college more as a credentialing institution rather than an academic institution.
The use of thesis-writing is to train the mind, or to prove that the mind has been trained; the former purpose is, I trust, promoted, the evidences of the latter are scanty and occasional.
The quarrel of the sociologists with the historians is that the latter have learned so much about how to do it that they have forgotten what to do. They have become so skilled in finding facts that they have no use for the truths that would make the facts worth finding.
College mostly makes people like bladders-just good for nothing but t'hold the stuff as is poured into 'em.
There is a tolerably general agreement about what a university is not. It is not a place of professional education.
The university's business is the conservation of useless knowledge; and what the university itself apparently fails to see is that this enterprise is not only noble but indispensable as well, that society can not exist unless it goes on.
Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it.
We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.
The most obvious purpose of college education is to help students acquire information and knowledge by acquainting them with facts, theories, generalizations, principles, and the like. This purpose scarcely requires justification.
I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.
