211 Quotes About Academia

I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.

An organization might embody a fixed mindset, conveying that employees either 'have it' or they don't: We called this a 'culture of genius.' Or it might embody more of a growth mindset, conveying that people can grow and improve with effort, good strategies, and good mentoring: We call this a 'culture of development.

Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.

The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions

I attended a symposium, an event named after a fifth century (B.C.) Athenian drinking party in which nonnerds talked about love; alas, there was no drinking, and mercifully, nobody talked about love.

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 essential functions as professional service or teaching do not get discussed openly or often enough.

After decades of talented race leaders, many of whom fell upon honourable swords, what we are left with now is educated liberals with dusky skin, warped notions, and limited vision

I personally believe (and I know many readers will find this controversial) that we should never engage with any writers or scholars whose work is intentionally Euro-American centered and purposely ignores or refuses to engage with knowledge produced by thinkers outside the West. In other words, in knowledge production, reciprocate treatment (whether in engagement or citation) can be effective in challenging and changing the rules of the game.

...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. The semiotic dialetics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking acadamese instead of English and they don't really know what's happening in the real world.