Academic Value Quotes

Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right.

College atheletes used to get a degree in bringing your pencil.

There are two kinds of experts: academic experts and practical experts. One is not better than the other, but they are very different, and each offers very different value.

College professors used to be badly paid and worth it. Colleges used to be modest institutions; they should go back to being modest institutions.

I got what I needed out of Princeton in 1 year, and I didn't think it was useful.

I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.

Nothing so good as a university education, nor worse than a university without its education.

Education is worth its weight in gold. Make no mistake about it.

There is an idea that a mind is wasted on the arts unless it makes you good in math or science. There is some evidence that the arts might help you in math and science.

The humanities have been forced to disguise, both from themselves and their students, why their subjects really matter, for the sake of attracting money and prestige in a world obsessed by the achievements of science.

What you learn at university is a good discipline but has little relevance to a real job.

The value of an arts education is widely accepted, especially in California.

Too many scholars think of research as purely a cerebral pursuit. If we do nothing with the knowledge we gain, then we have wasted our study. Books can store information better than we can--what we we do that books cannot is interpret. So if one is not going to draw conclusions, then one might as well just leave the information in the texts.

I want to understand how best to create and preserve a form of higher education that we value but that is in jeopardy for many reasons.

In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed.

I mean, my training at Oberlin has been absolutely valuable.

Many kids think unless they go to one of these great Ivy League schools, which I was lucky enough to go to later, that they won't get the same kind of learning. But I learned just the opposite lesson; that my best teachers were not at Harvard University.

The student is infinitely more important than the subject matter.

Lectures which really teach will never be popular; lectures which are popular will never really teach.

I have long since abandoned the notion that higher education is essential to either success or happiness. Hothouses of learning do not always grow anything edible.

Personally, I think universities are finished. So much rubbish gets taught.

The humanities are not something that get you a pension and health insurance.

In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing.

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.

School's always been very important to me.