211 Quotes About Academia

Annoying neighbor woman keeps telling me to get a job. You can't just sit around and do nothing. You'd be out on the street if you were MY child... she keeps saying. So what do you want me to do, exactly? Study Elephants in Norway, like YOUR kids? No... she says... you need a PHD for that job. Well I rest my case. Fuck work.

Fieldworkers must build a community of sentiment, with local and long-distance members, that opposes the competitive individualism of academia. The lone scholar is a sociological impossibility. Our “individual” works rely on language, literatures, and feedback from colleagues (Becker, 1986).

I had found that universities were no different from any other large organisation; the same timid conformity, the same stifling bureaucracy, was equally present in those supposed temples of creative thought and free expression as in the most faceless corporation.

[T]he elite academic institutions in America are fully controlled by fake legacies and greedy, unethical donors dictating how things work, how knowledge gets produced (or buried), and which researches get funded or shot down. In fact, I would not be surprised to learn that donors may even dictate which professors are hired behind closed doors.

And Unseen University took tradition very seriously, at least when it remembered to.

I get sick thinking about some idiot trying to wheedle insight on my apparatus criticus from my ghost long after I’ve forgotten what it was.

I get sickthinking about some idiot trying to wheedle insight on my apparatus criticus from my ghost long after I’ve forgotten what it was

It is one of the great ironies of corporate control that the corporate state needs the abilities of intellectuals to maintain power, yet outside of this role it refuses to permit intellectuals to think or function independently.

When he turned his head quickly his hair seemed to shake out light, and some persons thought they saw decided genius in this coruscation. Mr. Casaubon, on the contrary, stood rayless.