Academic Trends Quotes

People have been predicting the death of philosophy since the 17th century. When I was a student, people were saying, 'We're in the last days of philosophy.' Then we were told in the '60s it would be replaced by sociology, then by literary criticism.

It's one of the tragedies of the modern university that it offers little space to generalists.

The main insight learned from interdisciplinary studies is the return to specialization

Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics.

As Oscar Wilde should have said, when bad ideas have nowhere else to go, they emigrate to America and become university courses.

Until a few years ago, the topics in my Ph.D. were unfashionable, but they are very popular today.

In the academic world, biographies of these great figures of the past fell out of favor in the 1960s, when there was a turn toward social history, which meant the history of the voiceless and faceless. But the public at large never embraced the idea that these dead white guys should be abandoned.

The future consists of cross specialisation; that is how university systems abroad have evolved.

Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

A number of current theoretical explorations will turn out to be passing fancies...

The only creature less fashionable in academia than the stereotypical 'dead white male,' is the dead white male on horseback.

Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.