University Politics Quotes

A communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many.

I was invited to give the Freshmen Convocation at Florida Gulf Coast University on October 24, 2004. My book The Open Space of Democracy had been selected as one of the "common readers" for the university's 1,050 entering freshmen. On October 6, William Merwin, the president of Florida Gulf Coast, made the decision to "postpone" the convocation. He cited negative statements I had made in print about President Bush. If our colleges and universities are no longer the champions and protectors of free speech, then no voice in this country is safe.

Excuse me Mr. President, but it is we who are the university and not you.

I have been accused of wanting to purge the universities of left wingers. I want to purge the universities of idiots.

If UCL did offer to reinstate me, it would be churlish of me to refuse, but really, my work there was over.

Tolerance of true diversity on university campuses - diversity of opinion and belief - has been eroding for decades while alumni and trustees looked the other way.

I find it shameful that in nearly all the universities of Europe, Palestinian students sponsor and nurture anti-Semitism.

Real silencing occurs when a conservative tries to speak at a liberal university like Berkeley, and the party of anger and violence acts on their hatred when a police department says we can't protect a Republican speaker.

Safety' is a bogus argument regularly used by university officials to keep conservative speakers off of campuses. This isn't because conservatives are dangerous, but because the left often reverts to violence instead of words when presented with ideas it disagrees with.

Tom [Hentoff] - it started when he was the editor of the paper at Wesleyan and the - members of the staff. This was the first wave of political correctness. The editors of the staff members came and said he must - he must, from now on, stop using 'freshmen' and - in-as part of the policy of the paper. It had to be 'freshperson.' Therefore, you don't - you're not discriminating against males or females. They were very fervent about that, and he was equally fervent about not politicizing language. So until he left, 'freshmen' stayed.

Consider him in his highest incarnation: the university professor. What is his function? Simply to pass on to fresh generations of numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and, in large part, untrue. His whole professional activity is circumscribed by the prejudices, vanities and avarices of his university trustees, i.e., a committee of soap-boilers, nail manufacturers, bank-directors and politicians. The moment he offends these vermin he is undone. He cannot so much as think aloud without running a risk of having them fan his pantaloons.

Taxpayers, lawmakers and donors need to wake from the spell cast by American universities’ past glory. Only then can they summon the courage to withdraw funding and force the necessary change: replacing faux-academic political activists with real academic thinkers—people who care about original thought, not peddling an ideology.

When Nazi emissaries came to the United States, they were welcomed at Harvard.

When I was teaching at the University of Tehran we were struggling against the implementation of the revolution rules.

By giving professors jobs for life, universities create a feeling of unanswerable power among too many. Tenured professors who are uninterested in serving the student body are less likely to respond favorably to criticism, and are more likely to feel the freedom to intimidate or harass those with opposing viewpoints.

Being president of a major public university is the most political nonpolitical office around.

The job of mayor and Governor is becoming more and more like the job of university president, which I used to be; it looks like you are in charge, but you are not.

I knew that when I resigned from the University of Texas that I would never coach again.

Universities used to be places where the major political and social issues of the day could be researched and debated. The results of this careful thought and analysis were used to make political debates in the wider world more realistic and better informed. All that has now been turned on its head. The campus offers not a reasoned corrective to partisan passions, but fierce, one-sided advocacy of dangerous and destructive ideas.

Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaver-like tunneling to the top.

Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.

When I was a UA student, I was given the ultimate runaround when my student group wanted to bring author and activist David Horowitz to speak on campus.

[T]he most viciously intolerant campus I ever visited as a lecturer was Brown, where the humanities program has been gutted by a jejune brand of feminist theory and cultural and media studies.

The Pseudo-liberals monopolize the teaching jobs at many universities. Only men who agree with them are appointed as teachers and instructors of the social sciences, and only textbooks supporting their ideas are used.