Academia is a rarified culture, especially an Ivy League academic background.
A university is a place where ancient tradition thrives alongside the most revolutionary ideas. Perhaps as no other institution, a university is simultaneously committed to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow.
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
There are few greater temptations on earth than to stay permanently at Oxford in meditation, and to read all the books in the Bodlean.
If I were not a king, I would be a university man; and if it were so that I must be a prisoner, if I might have my wish, I would desire to have no other prison than that library [the Bodleian].
England was a delightful and stimulating place for a young academic, although by present standards, the laboratory facilities were primitive. There were almost no research grants and no secretarial assistance, even for Sherrington.
...The peculiar air of Oxford-the air of liberty to care for the things of the mind assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense.
To savages it would seem preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was going on in order that one might learn.
Meek young men grow up in libraries.
My real education began when I entered the University of Chicago in September 1951 as a graduate student.
As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there.
I'm a child of academics.
I think a part of me thought that I might be interested in academia because I really do love school. I mean that on all levels - I like educational environments; I like being part of that community of learning and exploration. And I like to talk.
I will venture to say there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit [in London], than in all the rest of the kingdom.
If I were founding a university I would begin with a smoking room; next a dormitory; and then a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had more money that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text books.
My dad is a retired Shakespeare professor, my mother a retired classicist. Suffice to say I grew up in a house full of books, where reading was encouraged if not required.
