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Academia Quotes

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Academia Quotes

“Labelling is no longer a liberating political act but a necessity in order to gain entrance into the academic industrial complex and other discussions and spaces. For example, if so called “radical” or “progressive” people don’t hear enough “buzz” words (like feminist, anti-oppression, anti-racist, social justice, etc.) in your introduction, then you are deemed unworthy and not knowledgeable enough to speak with authority on issues that you have lived experience with. The criteria for identifying as a feminist by academic institutions, peer reviewed journals, national bodies, conferences, and other knowledge gatekeepers is very exclusive. It is based on academic theory instead of based on lived experiences or values. Name-dropping is so elitist! You're not a "real" feminist unless you can quote, or have read the following white women: (insert Women's Studies 101 readings).”

RaceFeminismRacismFeministRadicalAcademyAcademiaFeminist TheoryPeople Of ColorWomen Of ColorRadical PoliticsAcademic Industrial Complex
Book:Feminism FOR REAL: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism
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“The movement's institutional legacy can also be seen in the realm of higher education: Chicano and Puerto Rican studies programs are the product of these movements and continue to play a key role in providing Latinos with a "civic education" that both politicizes and produces particular conceptions of Latino identity and subjectivity.”

AcademiaPuerto RicoChicano MovementLatino HistoryPuerto Rican Movement
Book:The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity
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“That we have scholars and Chicana PHDers of this caliber teaching in our educational institutions fulfills a vision of what we hoped would come out of the Chicano Movement. Even more extraordinary is the fact that most scholars do not forget “la causa Chicana,” thus watering the raices of the ancient past and living Chicano epic.”

AcademiaChicanaChicano Movement
Book:Enriqueta Vasquez And the Chicano Movement: Writings from El Grito Del Norte (Hispanic Civil Rights)
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“Given the current pace of its corporatization, academia may well become the worst institution for indoctrinating and subjugating many brilliant minds that may otherwise have great potential for dissidence and creating a new worldview, which is much needed amid the global turmoil we are experiencing internationally.”

AcademiaCorporate CultureIntellectual LifeCorporate GreedAcademicsIntellectual FreedomIntellectual HonestyAcademic FreedomAcademic Industrial ComplexAcademic Politics
Author:Louis Yako
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“Rather than speaking in terms of specific and distinct subgroups (Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, etc.) ‘Latino’ and ‘Hispanic’ have become the shorthand designation of choice among journalists, politicians, advertising executives, academics, and other influential elites.”

JournalismLatinoAcademiaHispanicPuerto RicoMexican AmericanMexican AmericansPuerto RicansCuban AmericanDominican American
Book:The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity
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“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 forced to remember cases because making copies of everything was too expensive. Keeping cases in your head is good, too, because cases are like puzzle pieces floating around in your mind, and sometimes, in moments of creativity, they fall into place and form a picture. If they were words on a screen that you could pull up anytime you wished, that phenomenon wouldn't happen as easily.”

LawAcademiaLaw SchoolLawyeringNexisLegal ResearchBrief WritingWestlaw
Book:Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption
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“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 that hard, you had to be at least a little bit screwed up.”

ScienceStudentsHard WorkIntelligenceIntellectCognitionAcademiaStudentGraduate SchoolGraduate StudentsStudyingGraduate StudiesGraduate Student
Book:The Magician's Land
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“The fully qualified Indian marine archaeologists who had dived on the structure in 1993 had not hesitated in their official report to pronounce it to be man-made with 'courses of masonry' plainly visible -- surely a momentous finding 5 kilometers from the shore at a depth of 23 metres? But far from exciting attention, or ruffling any academic feathers, or attracting funds for an extension of the diving survey to the other apparently man-made mounds that had been spotted bear by on the sea-bed -- and very far indeed from inspiring any Tamil expert to re-evaluate the derided possibility of a factual basis to the Kumari Kandam myth -- the NIO's discovery at Poompuhur had simply been ignored by scholarship, not even reacted to or dismissed, but just widely and generally ignored.”

AuthorityAcademiaArchaeologyMasonryDeep Human HistoryCataclysmMarine ArchaeologyUnderwater Structures
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“So what was going on in Malta that led to all this? Why did the first megalithic temple-builders in the world choose to make things so difficult for themselves? Why didn't they start with small megaliths (if that is not too serious a contradiction in terms)? Why didn't they start simple? Why did they plunge straight into the very complicated stuff, like Gigantija and the Hypogeum? And, having plunged, how did they manage to produce such magnificent results? Was it beginner's luck? Or were their achievements as humanity's pioneering architects the product of some sort of heritage? Beginner's luck is possible, but having studied the earliest temples, and their level of perfection, archaeologists agree that heritage is the right answer. The only problem is what heritage? And where is it to be looked for? Since it is the received wisdom that no human beings lived on Malta before 5200 BC, and since this is a 'fact' that is at present unquestioned anywhere within conventional scholarship, archaeologists from roughly the mid-twentieth century onwards have simply seen no reason to explore the possibility that the heritage of the Maltese temples might be older than 5200 BC. To do so would be the research equivalent of an oxymoron -- like breeding dodos, trying to conduct an interview with William Shakespeare or seeking evidence that the earth is flat -- and would invite the ridicule of one's peers.”

AuthorityHeritageEstablishmentAcademiaArchaeologyMegalithic Monuments
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“Spring of 1955 found Johnny and Klári settled into a small but comfortable house in Georgetown in Washington, D.C., Johnny having made the journey from postdoctoral immigrant to a presidential appointment in just twenty-five years. The interlude in Washington promised to lead to even more productive years ahead. “I want to become independent of the regulated academic life,” von Neumann had written to Klári from Los Alamos in 1943—a goal that was finally within reach. It was not to be.”

AcademiaIntellectual FreedomJohn Von Neumann
Book:Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe
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“In musing on all that occurred in the course of the several years of harassment the error I decided I made, and others frequently make, is to assume that we are all academics trying to sort out intellectual issues. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation is a political organization composed primarily of individuals who have been accused of child sexual abuse and those who support and defend them, sometimes for considerable sums. Such people are not going to be swayed by the research. They start with a fixed point of view-the need to deflect threat. That threat comes in the form of public exposure, loss of income, monetary penalties, or even in some cases incarceration. I heard a colleague say recently, in referring to the 30 or so studies that document the existence of recovered memory, “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 point of view. Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998”

PoliticalCrimeResearchAcademiaHarassmentFalse MemoriesFalse MemoryFalse Memory Syndrome FoundationFalsely AccusedRepressed MemoryRecovered Memory
Author:Anna Salter
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“The percentage of leading scientists who profess not to believe in a personal God tells us little unless we also know on what they base their profession. How much do they know about metaphysics, Christian theology, and intellectual history in relationship to their particular areas of scientific expertise? The intellectual relationship between religion and science is a two-way street. Just as one ought not to place much stock in geological views of a religious believer who has never studied geology, so one ought not to give much credence to the religious views of a scientist who has never studied intellectual history, the philosophy of religion, and theology. The highly specialized character of contemporary academic life makes it perfectly possible to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics, for example, while knowing nothing about the theology of creation, metaphysical univocity, and why they matter for questions pertaining to the reality of God and the character of God's relationship to the natural world.”

ScienceReligionBeliefChristianityAtheismTheologyAcademiaNew Atheists
Book:The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society
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“Ma d'altra parte, il linguista che voglia interpretare un testo oggi deve fare i conti con la frattura che esiste tra l'archeologia e la filologia in America. Il punto di vista filologico, con il suo dotto interesse per i testi come tali, è diventato ostico e incomprensibile per l'archeologia americana moderna, altamente sviluppata scientificamente per quel che riguarda la correlazione logica di prove strettamente materiali, ma la cui popolarità e i cui finanziamenti sono strettamente connessi con interessi estetici o legati alla concretezza della sua materia, i prodotti dell'uomo, in particolare di tipo esotico.”

AnthropologyAcademiaLinguisticsPhilologyArchaeologyologyBenjamin Lee WharfEdward Sapir
Book:Language, Thought, and Reality; Selected Writings
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“I gave my son a lavishly illustrated edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for his fourth birthday, and it did not take very long for me to realize that this was a gift for me, not for him. As Alice engaged in repartee with a dodo early in the book, my son became bored. Alice’s bewilderment and disorientation, which I had anticipated might speak to my son’s experience of being a child in an adult’s world, spoke instead to my own experience navigating the world of information. Being lost in Wonderland is what it feels like to learn about an unfamiliar subject, and research is inevitably a rabbit hole. I fell down it, in my investigation of immunization, and fell and fell, finding that it was much deeper than I anticipated. Like Alice, I fell past shelves full of books, more than I could ever read. Like Alice, I arrived at locked doors. “Drink me,” I was commanded by one source. “Eat me,” I was told by another. They had opposite effects - I grew and shrank, I believed and did not believe. I cried and then found myself swimming in my own own tears.”

ResearchAcademiaAlice In WonderlandDown The Rabbit HoleEula BissOn Immunity
Book:On Immunity: An Inoculation
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“Not knowing everything is not a curse; rather, it is a bold opportunity to understand. If you knew everything, that knowledge would slowly fade away into oblivion. But the fact that you know relatively nothing of all there is to know grants you the superpowers of dynamic comprehension and appreciation for your education.”

EducationLearning QuotesEducation QuotesLearning ProcessAcademiaLearning LessonsLearning By DoingCollege Quotes
Book:Study, Sleep, Repeat: 130 Tips to Schedule Your College Life
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“Those sad fucks haven’t a clue. Sticking your nose in a book doesn’t entitle you to call yourself an intellectual. You have to take your ideas to the street, confront the stupid wherever you find them, that’s what Zara says. You must force them to think, to see the power of ideas. Those withered academics hiding away in universities aren’t fooling anyone. They can’t hack it. They don’t encourage thought. They kill it. Zara wants to challenge every professor. That’s what her dissertation says. It’s a rallying call for true intellectuals. Intellect is a savage thing, not some cosy, peaceful pet to be shut away in institutions for the mild-mannered.”

AcademiaIntellectualsIvory TowerMandarinsCareerists
Author:Mike Hockney
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“U.S academia has long operated under the mediocre slogan of “publish or perish”, not taking into account that very often writers may perish the minute they publish, if they do not have something meaningful to say. As though adding to human knowledge can occur simply by killing some trees and publishing (mostly recycling) a couple of articles a year or one book every few years. Many academics that operate according to this slogan do not seem to remember Dostoyevsky’s words that the most difficult thing in life is to actually say something new, or George Orwell who once stated: “Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.”

WritingCreativityPublishingCreative WritingAcademiaAcademic WritingAcademic ResearchAcademic Politics
Author:Louis Yako
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“Soon after the news broke about these published conclusions [regarding the evidence of a Palaeolithic human presence on Malta] and their stark contradiction of the orthodox view on Malta's prehistory, the Italian team distanced itself from its initial Palaeolithic leanings and claimed instead that the depictions in Ghar Hasan are 'out of context' -- which indeed they are if one is only prepared to countenance a Neolithic context for the earliest human presence in Malta. Another development at about the same time was that the Ghar Hasan cave began to be vandalized, and the paintings defaced or completely removed, a process that continued over a long period. The result, which would have caused an international furore anywhere else but Malta, is that today: 'The only depictions which have survived, unless more are obscured by stalagmitic material on the cavern walls, are the two handprints in red pigment in Gallery D ... Vandalism not of the popular type has destroyed and obscured the entire repertoire of images on the accessible areas.”

AuthorityEstablishmentAcademiaArchaeologyVandalismNeolithicPalaeolithic
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“Mifsud notes that J. D. Evans had graduated from Cambridge in 1949 and that in the early 1950s he was 'in desperate need of a PhD'. The thesis that the future Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of London chose to develop, influenced by the Italian archaeologist Barnarbo Brea, was that the very first human inhabitants of the previously unpeopled Malta had been immigrants from the Neolithic Stentinello culture of Sicily -- a theory that is still part of the conventional academic wisdom about Malta today. In pursuing this thesis, Mifsud suggests, it was not convenient to the young Evans to have to deal with the evidence of the Ghar Dalam teeth that suggested a prior, Palaeolithic, human presence in Malta. This, then, either as a conscious or unconscious motive, could explain why Evans was so vehement in his attacks on the antiquity of the taurodonts [that could belong to Neanderthals] and so economical with the truth in his published statements about them. He wanted them out of the way -- permanently -- of his own theory about Malta's first inhabitants.”

AuthorityEstablishmentAcademiaNeanderthalsNeolithicPalaeolithic
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“Now, in the academy, you cannot just say anything about male theory. You have to proceed with an immanent critique, that is to say, you have to expertly play the parts against the whole. You show, for example, how certain assumptions in the work actually defeat its stated purpose of human liberation, but once remedied, i.e. salvaged, the theory will work for women. An immanent critique can stay within the masculinist academic circle. In this position women become the technicians of male theory who have to reprogram the machine, turning it from a war machine against women into a gentler, kinder war machine, killing us softly. This is a very involving task and after years of playing this part it is understandable that there may be little desire to admit that the effort was virtually futile. An investment has been made, and the conformity is not wholly outer. What attitudes and feelings does this sexist context produce towards oppositional women who refuse this male material? Does a male-circled woman have the power and security to be generous? Having compromised her freedom, will she be less willing to compromise ours? Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this arrangement, besides the ways it sets women against one another, is the fact that although the male academy values owning our freedom, it does not have to pay a lot for it. Masculine culture already controls gross amounts of female lives. Still, it seems to want more, but always at the same low price. The exploited are very affordable.”

FeminismAcademiaPostmodernismPoststructuralism
Author:Somer Brodribb
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“These are quite obviously the books that nobody reads,’ said Rocky, studying their titles. ‘But it’s a comfort to know that they are here if you ever should want to read them. I’m sure I should find them more entertaining than the more up-to-date ones. Wild Beasts and their Ways; Five Years with the Congo Cannibals; With Camera and Pen in Northern Nigeria; Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia. I wish people still wrote books with titles like that. Nowadays I believe it simply isn’t done to show a photograph of “The Author with his Pygmy Friends”—we have become too depressingly scientific.”

ScienceAnthropologyAcademia
Book:Excellent Women
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“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 allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort.”

TruthScienceValuesHonestyIntegrityLiesTreasonAcademiaOxfordVeracityFalsificationScholars
Book:The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist
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“Even for physical science, the ultimate test of whether or not something is true lies in the individual's experience, not in some objectified, dogmatic set of rules. The sensory experiences which are predictable from natural scientific 'laws' permit agreement between individuals because those individuals share very similar physical structures, are persuaded by the same kinds of logical reasoning, and operate with a similar set of values.”

RealityScienceResearchDogmaObjectivityAcademia
Book:Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety
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