Adjunct teachers are the professorial equivalent of the migrant Mexican farm laborers hired during harvest. If you can get a good contract at the same farm every year, where the farmer pays you on time...

Human history has become too much a matter of dogma taught by ‘professionals’ in ivory towers as though it’s all fact. Actually, much of human history is up for grabs. The further back you go,...

That’s something that’s sometimes missing from academia, that kind of an idea of an intellectual – someone who is literally in love with ideas.

She took a deep breath. “Let me begin again.” If this girl wanted to play ball in front of her department head, Christine would bring it. She closed her eyes and accessed the most expensive...

The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he...

I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams were coming up but still I was young; the grass was green and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and...

Fortunately, our colleges and universities are fully cognizant of the problems I have been delineating and take concerted action to address them. Curricula are designed to give coherence to the educational experience and to challenge...

What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.

As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud, with...

A computer search would have given me a list of pertinent cases, but without that I had to read everything. That is harder by far, but you end up learning a lot more. I was...

Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators

So many of the professional foreign policy establishment, and so many of their hangers-on among the lumpen academics and journalists, had become worried by the frenzy and paranoia of the Nixonian Vietnam policy that consensus...

Have I mentioned the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, and the collapse of a section of the Bay Bridge, or the Oakland ‘firestorm’ of 1991? No need. There are already there, in my narratives that...

In the midst of battle, you need something versatile to keep your focus

The body, the mind, and the spirit don’t form a pyramid, they form a circle. Each of them runs into the other two. The body isn’t below the mind and the spirit; from the point...

To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something… something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms — some...

What I learned on my own I still remember

If I can lure him away from academia, I’d be delighted.

There were no actual villains, just inertia. The administration genuinely wanted more diversity for reasons of its image as well as fairness, notwithstanding the cranky alumni letters in The Daily Princetonian. … Hiring committees had...

In bitter manuscript remarks on other men’s notions about solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.

There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream...

Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.

Academic chairs are many, but wise and noble teachers are few; lecture-rooms are numerous and large, but the number of young people who genuinely thirst after truth and justice is small.

The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination

There are times when wisdom cannot be found in the chambers of parliament or the halls of academia but at the unpretentious setting of the kitchen table.

Intellectual discourse and investigation is admittedly great fun but only truly meaningful when conducted in the service of others.

Eat me,” I was told by another. They had opposite effects – I grew and shrank, I believed and did not believe. I cried and then found myself swimming in my own own tears.

buzz” words (like feminist, anti-oppression, anti-racist, social justice, etc.) in your introduction, then you are deemed unworthy and not knowledgeable enough to speak with authority on issues that you have lived experience with. The criteria...

I don’t understand, Your Majesty. Of course, you don’t; you academics! Skarmak snarled. All you do is sit in your towers, trying to think your way into a reality that exists only in your own...

and those who are well meaning assume others are too, and keep arguing logically, keep producing more studies, keep expecting an academic debate, all the time assuming that the issue at hand is the truth...

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing

Most of us are pseudo-scholars…for we are a very large and quite a powerful class, eminent in Church and State, we control the education of the Empire, we lend to the Press such distinction as...

Universities are renowned for their tolerance of unusual characters, especially if they show originality and dedication to their research. I have often made the comment that not only are universities a ‘cathedral’ for worship of...

Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information, which is how I got a good job in journalism.

And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no...

Younger wizards in particular went about saying that is was time magic started to update its image and that they should all stop mucking about with bits of wax and bone and put the whole...

Silly you.”Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learned Author: Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998

It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person...

The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for...

The classical anthropological question, What is man?—”how like an angel, this quintessence of dust!”—is not now asked by anthropologists. Instead, they commence with a chapter on Physical Anthropology and then forget the whole topic and...

All my life I had thought that if you worked hard you would be rewarded. If you worked your ass off, there would be some reward for you. But now I knew that the reward...

Most faculty spend a lot of time thinking about content and what to cover, but content delivery is not the core strength of a university, just as it is not for newspapers. The core strength...

You get to the point where you wonder when is it going to be enough.” It is never going to be enough if the point is not searching for the truth but protecting a particular...

No special academic expertise is required for insight into the Orwellian use of language, only clear thinking and common sense.

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)

It’s curious how this parallels what goes on in academia. In academic fields like cultural studies, there’s a lot of emphasis placed on finding and celebrating instances of audience “counter-hegemony” or audience “agency” instances of...

The views of intellectuals influence the politics of tomorrow…What to the contemporary observer appears as the battle of conflicting interests has indeed often been described long before in a clash of ideas confined to narrow...

Needless to say, that meant that the Braekbills student body was quite the psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality. And to actually want to work...

One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one’s philosophy to fit...

Ideas matter—and philosophy is the art of thinking about them rigorously. In my view, that should be done in as public a forum as possible.