Research Universities Quotes & Sayings

Despite all the challenges facing higher education in America, from mounting student debt to grade inflation and erratic standards, our system is rightly the world's envy, and not just because our most revered universities remain on the cutting edge of research and attract talent from around the globe. We also have a plenitude and variety of settings for learning that are unrivaled. In light of that, the process of applying to college should and could be about ecstatically rummaging through those possibilities and feeling energized, even elated, by them. But for too many students, it's not, and financial constraints aren't the only reason. Failures of boldness and imagination by both students and parents bear some blame. The information is all out there. You just have to look. — Frank Bruni

The collective benefits of higher education will not be asserted unless the public can be engaged in defining them. A student's future returns on his or her personal investment of time and money will seem more critical than the public benefits to be derived from ensuring that all students become people of character as well as of competence. An institution's prowess in potentially lucrative lines of scientific research will seem more essential to its mission than its participation in the development of an aesthetically engaged and broadly humane society. Unless there is public discussion that can help support the balancing of public and private priorities, colleges and universities will dance only to the private ambitions that ensure continuing high levels of enrollment and high ratings in the various surveys of satisfaction that give institutions a boost in national rankings. — Ellen Condliffe Lagemann

If America's universities are indeed poor value for money, why might that be? The main reason is that the market for higher education, like that for health care, does not work well. The government rewards universities for research, so that is what professors concentrate on. Students are looking for a degree from an institution that will impress employers; employers are interested primarily in the selectivity of the institution a candidate has attended. Since the value of a degree from a selective institution depends on its scarcity, good universities have little incentive to produce more graduates. — Anonymous

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 knowledge, they are also 'sheltered workshops' for the socially challenged. — Tony Attwood

Sadly, embryonic stem cell research is completely legal in this country and has been going on at universities and research facilities for years. — Mike Pence

From schools to universities to research institutes, we teach about origins in disconnected fragments. We seem incapable of offering a unified account of how things came to be the way they are. — David Christian

There was a sense that the one true theory had been discovered. Nothing else was important or worth thinking about. Seminars devoted to string theory sprang up at many of the major universities and research institutes. At Harvard, the string theory seminar was called the Postmodern Physics seminar.
This appellation was not meant ironically. — Lee Smolin

Less than a decade after the explosion of the first atom bomb the megamachine had expanded to a point where it began to dominate key areas of the whole economy of the United States: its system of control reached beyond the airfields, the rocket sites, the bomb factories, the universities, to a hundred other related areas, tying the once separate and independent enterprises to a central organization whose irrational and humanly subversive policies ensured the still further expansion of the megamachine. Financial subventions, research grants, educational subsidies, all worked unceasingly for the 'Life, Prosperity, Health' of the new rulers, headed by Goliaths in brass armor bellowing threats of defiance and destruction at the entire world. In a short time, the original military-industrial-scientific elite became the supreme Pentagon of Power, for it incorporated likewise both the bureaucratic and the educational establishments. — Lewis Mumford

I think we're vastly over-invested in universities. Universities should be relatively small and provide excellent education and research in a number of specialized areas. I think the vast majority of young people should be going through non-university, post-secondary training. — Stephen Harper

College graduates work in every sector of the American economy, and the research engines incubated within our universities generate a wealth of ideas and innovations that have an enormous impact on our lives. — Gordon Gee

The strong point of American research universities is the manner in which trustees, presidents and other senior executives retain a considerable amount of decision-making authority while at the same time maintaining a culture of open exchange and participatory debate. — Henry Rosovsky

What are the top 20 universities in the world that do good materials research that might create carbon fibers to do jet stream kites or new magnets that will allow [energy] generation to be done up there and you just bring the electricity down. You either have to bring down rotational energy, which is hard, or you have to have the generator up there and bring down the electricity. Well, putting the generator up there is hard to do because it's too heavy. — Bill Gates

Our goal has been to more effectively promote the value of publicly-supported research at our universities, both to the Congress and to the general public. — Charles Vest

All money for agricultural extension, land grant universities has been toward developing industrial food. Lots of money has been invested toward maximizing yield. If you took even a small amount of that money and put it toward organic research, I don't have any doubts you could match those yields. — Michael Pollan

The notion that every well educated person would have a mastery of at least the basic elements of the humanities, sciences, and social sciences is a far cry from the specialized education that most students today receive, particularly in the research universities. — Joseph Stiglitz

If we want to identify the great success of American research universities, and that success goes far beyond Harvard, we have to come back to the question of governance. Excellence requires a firewall between trusteeship, or government ministries, and the academic decision-making process. This American concept of shared governance wherein the faculty are engaged in running the university as part of a collaboration with the other stakeholders. — Henry Rosovsky

Clinical and counseling psychology research literature is overwhelmingly overloaded with junk science (Hagen, 1997). Researchers and/or professors of psychology and psychiatry may have long illustrative careers where they have numerous refereed published studies, may have risen to high ranks, such as full professor, even at prestigious universities, may have served as editors or associate editors of several professional journals, and may have been voted as leaders in several professional organizations, all of which may be predicated on a career of doing nothing but junk science — David B. Stein

Research universities need excellent means to communicate and express their results to regular people. — John Maeda

It is time my colleagues got real. All British universities doing worthwhile research use animals, and, instead of hiding, they should be boasting of their achievements. — Robert Winston

The U.S. is the biggest investor in research and development in the world. It has the best universities. Keeping them supplied with the best talent is essential. — James Dyson

Taxes are how we pool our money for public health and safety, infrastructure, research, and services-from the development of vaccines and the Internet to public schools and universities, transportation, courts, police, parks, and safe drinking water. — Holly Sklar

I'm very concerned about the increasing distortion of research by the intrusion of the market. Universities are beginning to see science as a means of attracting funds. — Philip Kitcher

Japanese universities have a chair system that is a fixed hierarchy. This has its merits when trying to work as a laboratory on one theme. But if you want to do original work you must start young, and young people are limited by the chair system. Even if students cannot become assistant professors at an early age they should be encouraged to do original work.
... Industry is more likely to put its research effort into its daily business. It is very difficult for it to become involved in pure chemistry. There is a need to encourage long-range research, even if we don't know its goal and if its application is unknown. — Kenichi Fukui

The basic theme of a hostile environment that seeks to destroy the ideology has many variations. Hitler fought his life-and-death struggle against a coalition (constructed by him alone) of 'Jewish, plutocratic and Bolshevik powers supported by the Vatican'; Ulrike Meinhof's indignation was directed against 'the German parliamentary coalition, the American government, the police, the state and university authorities, the bourgeois, the Shah of Iran, the multinational corporations, the capitalist system'; the opponents of nuclear energy imagine themselves up against a powerful, monolithic alliance of irresponsible corporations, the powers of high finance, and all the institutions that are slave to it: courts, authorities, universities, as well as other research institutions, and political parties. — Paul Watzlawick

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 phenomenon that they are investigating, to create laboratories that are far more controlled than you would ever find in industry, and to ignore any constraints imposed by, as it were, realism. Further down the scale, people who understand and want to exploit results of basic science have to do a great deal more work to adapt and select the results, and combine the results from different sources, to produce something that is applicable, useful, and profitable on an acceptable time scale. — C.A.R. Hoare

{Before the time of Benjamin Peirce it never occurred to anyone that mathematical research} was one of the things for which a mathematical department existed. Today it is a commonplace in all the leading universities. Peirce stood alone - a mountain peak whose absolute height might be hard to measure, but which towered above all the surrounding country. — Julian Coolidge

Universities think people come up with great ideas by closing the door. The academic tenure process, where you have to publish to journals which are very narrow, stands in the way of great research. — Clayton Christensen

Great research universities must insist on independence from government and on the exercise of academic freedom. — Alan Dershowitz

With leading research universities, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and private companies like Blue Sun working on developing alternative fuels, Colorado is poised to become an international leader in clean energy. — Ken Salazar

There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable. — Harold Bloom

I bring other constituencies - I also have ties to minority communities. And obviously, to the world of world-class research universities. So I can bring some constituencies that I'm used to working with. — Donna Shalala

The Science Coalition, which grew out of an initial concept at Harvard and at MIT, has now grown to an informal group of about 60 research universities. — Charles Vest

Shared governance is often the critical element that is missing in Asian universities, no matter how talented the faculty may be. Either it is ministries of education that are trying to run things, or in private institutions - those who control the funds. Neither group knows much about teaching and research. — Henry Rosovsky

Critics of American colleges typically attribute the failings of undergraduate education to a tendency on the part of professors to neglect their teaching to concentrate on research. In fact, the evidence does not support this thesis, except perhaps in major research universities. — Derek Bok

In the U.S.A., technical innovations come out of universities and the research produced by Ph.D. students. We don't have that happening in India. — Ram Shriram

To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities ... than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises. — Hannah Arendt

Every scholarly history that was written before 1920 was written by a man who had been taught by a man, whose thesis would be examined by a man, and whose book would be published by a male publisher and reviewed by a male critic. This could not change until women were admitted to universities and colleges. When women could train as historians in the universities, they could for the first time research, write, and publish scholarly history. — Philippa Gregory

Literally from the moment I came in the door of MIT, it was very clear that a highly productive 40-year partnership between U.S. research universities and the federal government was badly eroding. — Charles Vest

Augustine says that you don't understand a nation by the throw weight of its military or the strength of its research universities or the size of its population, but by looking at what it loves in common. To assess a nation, you look at the health and strength of its ideals. And there's no question that the common love in America is freedom. — Os Guinness

The question of how much English should be used in international research universities is one with which I am extremely familiar. I would even say I am deeply puzzled by this trend. I am not certain what the correct answer should be. — Henry Rosovsky

Key is the question of where do new ideas come from. Historically, four places: government labs, big corporations, startup companies, and research universities. — Nicholas Negroponte

Most computer users by the end of the century made regular use of the Internet, a vast web of worldwide computer networks born in the late 1960s in the work done by the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and universities it commissioned. Its founders had needed to share information with researchers working on government contracts at various universities. Once computer users at these well-funded institutions realized the possibilities of an electronic network connecting them with colleagues worldwide, word of the wonder spread and the Internet blossomed. By the late 1980s, anyone with a computer equipped with a modem hooked up to a regular telephone line could send an "E-mail" message or any other electronic document to anyone similarly equipped anywhere in the world - instantaneously. By 1994, the number of people connected to the World Wide Web of computer networks had swelled to an estimated 15 million. — Douglas Brinkley

Nevada has a world-class economy. It will only build a world-class culture with world-class research universities coupled with the Desert Research Institute. — James E. Rogers

There are, however, many challenges to Asian universities. First, academic freedom, in all senses, is much more critical to the success of a university than how much money is spent on infrastructure or on hiring big names. Faculty need to have the space to pursue the research that they are passionate about and the also need to have the freedom to express their opinions in the university, and in the society as a whole. — Henry Rosovsky

Our combination of great research universities, a pro-risk business culture, deep pools of innovation-seeking equity capital and reliable business and contract law is unprecedented and unparalleled in the world. — Marc Andreessen