Academic Relevance Quotes

Anything that promotes a kernel of science, even though it's exaggerated and hyped by Hollywood, I think is a step forward. We in the ivory tower ultimately have to realize that in some sense we have to sing for our supper.

I think it's always important for academics to study popular culture, even if the thing they are studying is idiotic. If it's successful or made a dent in culture, then it is worthy of study to find out why.

Listen, here's the thing about an English degree - if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.

If you want to take gender studies, that’s fine, go to a private school. But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.”

This paper will no doubt be found interesting by those who take an interest in it.

Professor Al Drake encouraged me to just write the way I talk. I decided if that's what I needed to do, I didn't need to be in school to do it.

College football: I do not see the relationship of those highly industrialized affairs on Saturday afternoons to higher learning in America.

A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.

By no definition of any modern scientist is intelligent design science, and it's a waste of our students' time to subject them to it.

People used to laugh that academics would study Disney movies. There's nothing more important for academics to study, because they shape the minds of our children possibly more than any single thing.

I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.

What, of course, we want in a university is for people to learn the skills they're going to need outside the classroom. So, having a system that had more emphasis on inquiry and exploration but also on learning and practising specific skills would fit much better with how we know people learn.

I'm even stunned at some of the majors you can get in college these days. Like you can major in the mating habits of the Australian rabbit bat, major in leisure studies... Okay, get a journalism major. Okay, education major, journalism major. Right. Philosophy major, right. Archeology major. I don't know, whatever it is. Major in ballroom dance, of course. It doesn't replace work. How about a major in film studies? How about a major in black studies? How about a major in women studies? How about a major in home ec? Oops, sorry! No such thing.

History without the history of science, to alter slightly an apothegm of Lord Bacon, resembles a statue of Polyphemus without his eye-that very feature being left out which most marks the spirit and life of the person. My own thesis is complementary: science taught ... without a sense of history is robbed of those very qualities that make it worth teaching to the student of the humanities and the social sciences.

Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut, and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant.

The higher my GPA gets the more I realize high school is useless

I'm 100% proud of the TV work I achieved. The work I did on shows on insects and Great White sharks... stuff that's in school curriculums in England. Now they are showing up on Discovery Channel.

We teach and test things most students have no interest in and will never need, and facts that they can Google and will forget as soon as the test is over

The objective of education should be impressed on the children's minds. The academic education of today is shallow and useless because it has no value orientation.

If you're going to be an academic who's involved in the world of policy, you have to be involved in the world that exists.

Many feminists in the academy and in the major women's groups are knocking down open doors. It's 2016, not 1950. But you wouldn't know that if you looked through a typical women's studies textbook or website.

Let's be clear about one thing. Non-college educated doesn't mean stupid. It means you wisely chose not to pay $40,000 a year to be lectured on microaggressions.

I'd rather have half of my idea change the world than my whole idea be a few papers in a journal.

One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it.

When I was confronted with official tuition, the academic thing, I could see no relationship whatever between that and the music I'd been writing since I was 11.