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...

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...

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...

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...

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)

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind … is the one fundamental treason which the scholar’s mind must not...

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.

Do or don’t, there is no don. Don is an honor not bestowed on any procrastinator, not even a professor at Oxford.

The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.

Ideas are cheap — making something of them is difficult

…he imagined another life for himself as one of these silent scholars, buried in his research like a guinea pig in its wood shavings, nibbling away steadily after some arcane piece of knowledge in the...

You’d think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him,” said Miss Hillyard. “It didn’t pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour...

One increasingly hears rumors of a reconciliation between science and religion. In major news magazines as well as at academic conferences, the claim is made that that belief in the success of science in describing...

The tunnel under the wall of intellectual snobbery is the only way back to common sense reality, but most won’t find it because it is beneath them.

What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in...

I still feel glad to emphasize the duty, the defining characteristic of the pure scientist—probably to be found working in universities—who commit themselves absolutely to specialized goals, to seek the purest manifestation of any possible...

I’m completely dyslexic, so academia was never really my path.

What’ll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?” demanded Miss Haydock.”Well, Eve — it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only...

Information or allegations reflecting negatively on individuals or groups seen less sympathetically by the intelligentsia pass rapidly into the public domain with little scrutiny and much publicity. Two of the biggest proven hoaxes of our...

…I’m worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary....

Certain American uses of deconstruction, Derrida has observed, work to ensure ‘an institutional closure’ which serves the dominant political and economic interests of American society. Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new...

Shulman argues that work that is valued is work that is presented to colleagues. The failure to make this kind of wider connection weakens the sense of community. This happens in scholarly life when such...

But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before.

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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

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

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...

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...

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

What I learned on my own I still remember

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

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...

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.

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...