Quotes & Sayings About Universities

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse. — H.L. Mencken

We are in an international marketplace for talent, and American colleges and universities need to be able to attract students and faculty from around the world if we want to sustain our excellence. — Drew Gilpin Faust

equality. Qatar has adopted the Education City project, in which it has invited a collection of prestigious American universities to open up branches here in Doha. Some of these universities include Carnegie Mellon University, the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, — Carol Henderson

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

When I said that the mentally ill should be in institutions, public universities weren't the kind of institutions I had in mind. — Robert Stacy McCain

And speaking of options ,these kids [the ones who attend elite universities] have all been told that theirs are limitless. Once you commit to something, though, that ceases to be true. A former student sent me an essay he wrote, a few years after college, called "The Paradox of Potential." Yale students, he said, are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation. — William Deresiewicz

The common Calvinist experience of life as a refugee, or of being part of a host community that received refugees, led to lasting international connections between individuals and communities...As churches became established in Switzerland, the Palatinate, Scotland, England and Bearn, and the churches in the Netherlands, France, Hungary and Poland battled for legal recognition and survival, princely courts, noble houses, universities and colleges also became locations for interactions between many Calvinists. Theologians, clergy, students, booksellers, merchants, diplomats, courtiers and military officers became involved in networks of personal contacts, correspondence, teaching and negotiation. — Graeme Murdock

I think liberal art faculties at major universities have views that are not very sound, at least on public policy issues - they may know a lot of French however. — Charlie Munger

Up up and quit your books' is not an adjuration commonly thought advisable in universities but there are occasions -- as for instance, when studying Wordsworth when it might be advisable. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Most subjects at universities are taught for no other purpose than that they may be re-taught when the students become teachers. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Typically cult groups target universities and colleges. Most likely those schools that maintain campus housing. — Rick Ross

Since his time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure. The tailor adapts the manikin as well as the clothes to his patron's wants. The tailor's object, in this volume, is to fit young men, in universities or elsewhere, to be men of the world, equipped for any emergency ; and the garment offered to them is meant to show the faults of the patchwork fitted on their fathers. — Henry Adams

In the Far East, studying yoga is comparable to a mixture of attending one of the best Western universities, and of being an intrepid explorer. — Frederick Lenz

Our universities and museums are respected around the country. — Jane Byrne

Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes. — Milton Friedman

Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates. — Abbott Lawrence Lowell

The trouble is not chiefly that our universities are unfit for students but that many present-day students are unfit for universities. — Eric Hoffer

My children were educated in what were then Chinese schools, and they learned English as a subject. But they made up when they went to English-language universities. So they didn't lose out. They had a basic set of traditional Confucian values. Not my grandchildren. — Lee Kuan Yew

There are dons who care for the intellect and the imagination, and there are priests who care for the spirit; but broadly speaking the function of universities and churches alike is to trim and tame enthusiasm, to suppress curiosity, and, in short, to whittle immortal souls into serviceable props of the established order. — Hugh Kingsmill

I am broadly concerned about the slow death of free speech, but particularly in universities and also with regards to the climate change debate. — Judith Curry

Colleges and universities, meanwhile, have no such qualms about torturing their applicants. Think about how much work a high-school student must do to even be considered for a spot at a decent college. The difference in college and job applications is especially striking when you consider that a job applicant will be getting paid upon acceptance while a college applicant will be paying for the privilege to attend. — Steven D. Levitt

Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

That is the future, and it is probably nearer than we think. But our primary problem as universities is not engineering that future. We must rise above the obsession with quantity of information and speed of transmission, and recognize that the key issue for us is our ability to organize this information once it has been amassed - to assimilate it, find meaning in it, and assure its survival for use by generations to come. — Vartan Gregorian

An indigenous culture with sufficient territory, and bilingual and intercultural education, is in a better position to maintain and cultivate its mythology and shamanism. Conversely, the confiscation of their lands and imposition of foreign education, which turns their young people into amnesiacs, threatens the survival not only of these people, but of an entire way of knowing. It is as if one were burning down the oldest universities in the world and their libraries, one after another - thereby sacrificing the knowledge of the world's future generations. — Jeremy Narby

It would be foolish and wrong to ignore the fact that all our universities today tread a very dangerous path. Increasingly, they are accepting government money because they are doing things that government wants done. How great a peril is this in a democracy? — Vincent Massey

Terrorist groups will not, in most instances, openly recruit from universities or the well developed areas that politicians and business leaders are always focusing on. They will not flight newspaper or TV adverts, but will use belief systems riding on the back of disadvantages, poverty and problems that have remained unaddressed in particular communities, tribal and religious ideologies. They will recruit the most vulnerable to harm and attack the most vulnerable, in order to spite leaders and authorities. — Archibald Marwizi

I have a friend - or had a friend, now dead - Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it ... and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too. — Steven Weinberg

She called me Nerdy because I wore glasses and read books and ate yogurt on my lunch break. I'm not really a nerd: I only aspire to be one. Because of the high-school-dropout thing, I'm a self-didact. (Not a dirty word, look it up.) I read constantly. I think. But I lack formal education. So I'm left with the feeling that I'm smarter than everyone around me but that if I ever got around really smart people - people who went to universities and drank wine and spoke Latin - that they'd be bored as hell by me. It's a lonely way to go through life. So I wear the name as a badge of honor. That someday I may not totally bore some really smart people. The question is: How do you find smart people? — Gillian Flynn

Look to the past to help create the future. Look to science and to poetry. Combine innovation and interpretation. We need the best of both. And it is universities that best provide them. — Drew Gilpin Faust

If you do not share the universities' values, it could be a big mistake to send your children to college before they are intellectually and morally prepared for the indoctrination-rather-than-education they will receive there. Therefore, prepare them morally and intellectually and, if possible, do not send them to college right after high school. Let them work for a year, or perhaps travel (for example, given the antipathy to Israel on campuses, a trip to Israel would be both morally clarifying and maturing). The younger the student, the less life experience and maturity they have, the more they are likely to embrace the rejection of your values. — Dennis Prager

When I was young, most teachers of philosophy in British and American universities were Hegelians, so that, until I read Hegel, I supposed there must be some truth to his system; I was cured, however, by discovering that everything he said on the philosophy of mathematics was plain nonsense. — Bertrand Russell

I taught workshops at universities. I wrote for magazines. This took time and insane amounts of juggling, but it's how I earned a living. — Cheryl Strayed

For a world full of universities, brilliant people and clever corporations it sure is a pit of hell and sorrow for billions. What's missing? — Bryant McGill

I was raised in a Bronx public housing project, but studied at two of the nation's finest universities. I did work as an assistant district attorney, prosecuting violent crimes that devastate our communities. — Sonia Sotomayor

The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings — John Stuart Mill

If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell 'friend,' I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend. — Richard P. Feynman

I don't understand why Universities only offer undergraduate classes during the day when their professional staff should be smart enough to know that a large percentage of their students are non-traditional. — Heather Chapple

As countries embrace mass higher education, the cost of maintaining universities increases dramatically relative to an elite system. — Derek Bok

There is every reason for being cautious about founding new universities till India has digested Her newly acquired freedom. — Mahatma Gandhi

Traveling has become such a miserable experience that no Palestinian does it, except those who absolutely have to: students attending foreign universities, patients needing care unavailable in Gaza, businesspeople attempting to pretend that their world will eventually be normal. — Izzeldin Abuelaish

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses - especially the older ones - functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn't last a week in GenPop. — Jincy Willett

There is a whole school of thought that holds bureaucracy tends to expand according to a kind of perverse but inescapable inner logic. The argument runs as follows: if you create a bureaucratic structure to deal with some problem, that structure will invariably end up creating other problems that seem as if they, too, can only be solved by bureaucratic means. In universities, this is sometimes informally referred to as the "creating committees to deal with the problem of too many committees" problem. — David Graeber

graduates of elite American universities who had little sense of what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of them decided to get a job working for a Wall Street investment bank or management consultancy. If you don't know what your passion is or what you really want to do, they said, then "you might as well go to Wall Street and make a lot of money if you can't think of anything better to do."36 And I have heard similar comments from young graduates of selective colleges and universities. Nobody has ever taught them that what you do influences the kind of person you will become. — Leonard Sax

The gentry's jurisdiction over the peasantry was restored. The universities were closed to the children of the lower classes; the radical literary periodicals were banned; the nation, including the intelligentsia, was to be forced back into mute submission. Revolutionary — Isaac Deutscher

University, as institutions, pre-date the information economy by many centuries and are not for-profit cultural entities, whose reason of existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization not just download data into student skulls. — Bruce Sterling

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

As I visualize it, the business of the future will be a scientific, social and economic unit. It will be vigorously creative in pure science where its contributions will compare with those of the universities. — Edwin Land

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. — Ludwig Von Mises

As one of the country's largest land-grant universities, Ohio State must play a critical role in moving our country forward. — Gordon Gee

The United States has got to join the rest of the industrialized world in making sure that working families of the middle class have benefits that they absolutely need. We are the only major country on Earth that does not guarantee health care to all people as a right. We are the only major country on Earth that does not provide paid family and medical leave. There are many countries around the world which make sure that public colleges and universities are tuition-free. In our country, it's becoming increasingly difficult to afford to go to college. — Bernie Sanders

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

All information belongs to everybody all the time. It should be available. It should be accessible to the child, to the woman, to the man, to the old person, to the semiliterate, to the presidents of universities, to everyone. It should be open. — Maya Angelou

No Arab country produces graduates who can compete with their East Asian counterparts; the only Muslim country whose graduates meet world standards is Turkey. University graduates throughout the Arab world have miserable prospects. "The average unemployment rate for the age group 15-24 years in the Group of Arab Countries reaches to 30%, compared with an average rate of world 14.4%," according to the Arab Labor Organization. "Problem [sic] of high unemployment rates among the educated graduates from universities and colleges, which reaches to 26.8% in Morocco and 19.3% in Algeria, 17.7 % in Jordan. It was noted that 94% of the unemployed in the Arab Republic of Egypt are in the age group 15-29 years, reflecting a lack of consistency of education plans to the needs of the Labor market."9 — David Goldman

ROBERT MASELLO is the author of many previous works of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the novels Blood and Ice and The Medusa Amulet. A native of Evanston, Illinois, he studied writing under the novelists Robert Stone and Geoffrey Wolff at Princeton, and has since taught and lectured at many leading universities. For six years, he was the visiting lecturer in literature at Claremont McKenna College. He now lives and works in Santa Monica, — Robert Masello

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

Universities are full of knowledge; the freshmen bring a little in and the seniors take none away, and knowledge accumulates. — A. Lawrence Lowell

The universities of the 21st century are going to be the smokestacks of the century. — Gordon Gee

Before and after emancipation, the Negro, in self-defense, was propelled toward the white employer. The endowments of wealthy white men have developed great institutions of learning for the Negro, but the freedom of action on the part of these same universities has been curtailed in proportion as they are indebted to white philanthropies. — W.E.B. Du Bois

I had been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who got drunk - and I would have liked to have the boozing scholars of the Universities wheeled into line and properly chastised for their squalid misuse of what I must ever regard as a gift of the gods. — Winston Churchill

It fulfils the purpose of Universities if they can find out ways of achieving those feats which haven't been achieved till now. — Narendra Modi

I have long been one of those tedious people who rails against the coronation of 'student-athletes.' I have heard the argument that big-time athletics bring in loads of money to universities. I don't believe the money goes anywhere other than back into the sports teams, but that's another story. — Susan Orlean

I felt a failure because I couldn't sustain myself from what I earned from my writing. My day jobs were what mattered, and it was hard to even get those because universities wouldn't hire me as a real writer. — Sandra Cisneros

In education, we need to begin paying attention to matters routinely ignored. We spend long hours trying to teach a variety of courses on, say, the structure of government or the structure of the amoeba. But how much effort goes into studying the structure of everyday life - the way time is allocated, the personal uses of money, the places to go for help in a society exploding with complexity? We take for granted that young people already know their way around our social structure. In fact, most have only the dimmest image of the way the world of work or business is organized. Most students have no conception of the architecture of their own city's economy, or the way the local bureaucracy operates, or the place to go to lodge a complaint against a merchant. Most do not even understand how their own schools - even universities - are structured, let alone how much structures are changing under the impact of the Third Wave. — Alvin Toffler

I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in my tool box to fix that kind of situation. — Muhammad Yunus

Sadness is one of the best universities in life! Though bad things take good things from us, they do give us useful things as well! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Universities are institutions run by amateurs to train professionals. — Derek Bok

Universities simply unable to play judge, jury and executioner when they're already having trouble playing educator. Resources are limited and colleges must put their focus on their primary objective: education. — Claire McCaskill

At some of our most competitive universities, 17 times the amount of students that can go to the school, apply. And these applicants are from all over the country, and admissions officers need ways to sort through them. The SAT is just one of those things. — Jonathan Grayer

When I re-read the Odyssey, it felt like I was reading PD James or Minette Walters - you feel that you are sharing in something that hundreds of millions of people have read with love, and I think that this is worth holding onto. It is not a matter of canonical texts or elitism, which the universities are trying to make us wary about. It is about shared language and metaphor and experience and imagery and that is all good. — Robert Dessaix

Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs, have played an important role in enriching the lives of not just African Americans, but our entire country. — Ric Keller

A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men. — H.L. Mencken

The very concept of an Iranian university is an oxymoron. There are no free and open places of learning in that repressive theocracy. Dissenters are not given tenure; they are murdered, after first being tortured. Blasphemy, which is broadly defined, is punished. Gays are not only excluded from Iranian universities, but are imprisoned and killed. — Alan Dershowitz

The definitive resolution of the UFO enigma will not come about unless and until the problem is subjected to open and extensive scientific study by the normal procedures of established science and administrators in universities. — Peter A. Sturrock

America's founding fathers did not intend to take religion out of education. Many of the nation's greatest universities were founded by evangelists and religious leaders; but many of these have lost the founders concept and become secular institutions. Because of this attitude, secular education is stumbling and floundering. — Billy Graham

A Conference Board survey released in January of 2010 found that only 45 percent of workers surveyed were happy at their jobs, the lowest in 22 years of polling.2 Depression rates today are ten times higher than they were in 1960.3 Every year the age threshold of unhappiness sinks lower, not just at universities but across the nation. Fifty years ago, the mean onset age of depression was 29.5 years old. Today, it is almost exactly half that: 14.5 years old. — Shawn Achor

A society - any society - is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on. — Robert Reich

Including my nine years as a student, the majority of my life has been at Hokkaido University. After my retirement from the university in 1994, I served at two private universities in Okayama Prefecture - Okayama University of Science and Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts - before retiring from university work in 2002. — Akira Suzuki

Scratch the surface at conservative think tanks and universities that house free-market economists, and it's not hard to find proponents of a carbon tax. — Nina Easton

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. — Camille Paglia

One of the unfortunate things about creative writing courses is that they make people impatient. People feel that they have prepared themselves and that they must now do it. In fact there are positive incentives for doing so - universities are offering degrees for writing novels. — Robert Dessaix

Universities are no longer the intellectual centers of the country. The very idea is preposterous. Universities are the backwater. Don't look so surprised. I'm not saying anything you don't know. Since World War II, all the really important discoveries have come out of private laboratories. — Michael Crichton

The universities are available only to those who share my revolutionary beliefs. — Fidel Castro

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change. — J.G. Ballard

Ocean's remarkable stories, depth of commitment, and eloquent communication make him a fantastic resource for conferences, universities, and indeed everyone who wants a potent dose of grounded inspiration. — Van Jones

By 1988, I'm seeing this commercial phenomenon beginning to show up. Hardware makers are selling routers to universities so they can build up their campus networks. So I remember thinking, 'Well, how are we going to get this in the hands of the general public?' There were no public Internet services at that point. — Vint Cerf

We don't only want to make robots in universities; we want to create good humans. We can't shape a world only with the help of robots made out of technical know-how. We can't be useful to humankind if there are no sentiments in life. — Narendra Modi

An education, then, is a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means of material, embodied practices. And this will be true even of the most instrumentalist, pragmatic programs of education (such as those that now tend to dominate public schools and universities bent on churning out "skilled workers") that see their task primarily as providing information, because behind this is a vision of the good life that understands human flourishing primarily in terms of production and consumption. Behind the veneer of a "value-free" education concerned with providing skills, knowledge, and information is an educational vision that remains formative. — James K.A. Smith

When I went to school, there were no Black philosophers, at least none that I was aware of, who were recognized by Western universities. — Walter Mosley

A German merchant of the fifteenth century asked an eminent professor where he should send his son for a good business education. The professor responded that German universities would be sufficient to teach the boy addition and subtraction but he would have to go to Italy to learn multiplication and division. Before you smile indulgently, try multiplying or even just adding the Roman numerals CCLXIV, MDCCCIX, DCL, and MLXXXI without first translating them. — John Allen Paulos

Speaking as someone who bought the party line for far too long, you would be amazed what you can believe if you keep convincing yourself the press, the libs, the universities - hell, everyone but a few on the religious fringe and big business - are out to get you. I was lucky - I started to snap out of this a couple of years ago and hopefully will now apply to both major parties the same skepticism and cynicism I had in the past reserved for Democrats. — John Cole

Universities are no longer educational in any sense of the word that Rousseau would have recognised. Instead, they have become unabashed instruments of capital. Confronted with this squalid betrayal, one imagines he would have felt sick and oppressed. — Terry Eagleton

Universities should be safe havens where ruthless examination of realities will not be distorted by the aim to please or inhibited by the risk of displeasure. — Kingman Brewster Jr.

Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities. — Ludwig Von Mises

I almost stopped teaching entirely. The worst thing for me is contact with students. I like universities without students. And I especially hate American students. They think you owe them something. They come to you ... Office hours! — Slavoj Zizek

I had been educated with free scholarships. I went to nine different universities, always at public expense, and when you have that experience, you are almost obligated to give it back. It's as simple as that. — James A. Michener

I studied every thing but never topped ... But today the toppers of the best universities are my employees — Bill Gates

The education system is where young skulls full of mush are programmed and propagandized into the system. They are highly valuable. That's why they're subsidized. You know, universities are approaching the same circumstance we have in health care. What it costs is not related at all to market forces. Meaning what it costs is not related to what people can afford. You get right down to it, how many Americans, how many families can afford 20,000, 30,000, $50,000 a year or semester to send their kids off to college? It has to be subsidized. — Rush Limbaugh

It was a time of turmoil at colleges and universities. And I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly. And I couldn't help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community. — Samuel Alito

This larger goal wouldn't be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing. — Robert M. Pirsig

The battle against good and evil is raging now! Look at your television programming and movie advertisements presenting the occult ... the demonic ... the satanic ... the practice of witchcraft and sorcery in popular books ... the open hostility toward Christianity and the revival of anti-Semitism. The fight is on for the hearts and minds of our children in ours homes, our schools, our universities, and our society. — John Hagee