Academics From The United States

"Whether or not a researcher of a certain notoriety deserves that the ‘support system’ [to] keep him going, there is a far more general problem: What props up biological research, at least in the vaunted US of A, involves a situation so deeply imbued with entitlement mentality that it has sunk into institutional corruption. A principal symptom of this state of affairs involves the following: People are hired after they have undergone long stints of training; and a potential hiree must present a large body of documented accomplishments. In my day you could get a faculty job with zero post-doc papers, as in the case of yours truly; but now the CV of a successful applicant looks like that of a newly minted full Professor from olden times. Notwithstanding these demands, and the associated high quality of a fledgling faculty-level type, the job starts with some “set-up” money for equipping the lab; but next to no means are provided to initiate that ‘research program’ and to sustain it during the years to come."

"Building new hospitals or shelters alone (to treat COVID-19-infected people) is not adequate. It will also need to be complemented by community strategies, such as limiting group activities, and personal hygiene practices."

"Walter Goffart... is a more serious critic, but to some extent even he is tilting at windmills... Goffart's main point is that one cannot heal the Germanische Altertumskunde - the study of Germanic Antiquity - by surgically removing the racist element as if this was just a recent blemish of limited size caused by Nazism. In fact, he says, what one needs is a full-scale rethinking. The racist element is not just something that was added by the Nazis, but was inherent in the way Germanic Antiquity has been studied for centuries. In Goffart's view the Germanische Altertumeskunde was connected with a large body of anti-Enlightenment thought and nationalism long before the Nazis came and took from it whatever they could use... Goffart is mistaken in his analysis... Goffart is aiming his guns at a position that has long been abandoned."

"From the mid-1990s onward, Walter Goffart and his school (Gillett 2002b; Goffart 2006) have directed their critique not against any current views, but against the old Wenskus “kernel of tradition” model: according to them, it was only a more sophisticated way to maintain German nationalist claims of ethnic continuity. The only way out of nationalist myths was to show that ethnicity was irrelevant in the migration age, as were the barbarians altogether. Therefore, Goffart’s approach is a vigorous attempt to prove Roman continuity after the “fall of Rome,” and to deny any barbarian impact on the end of the Western empire."

"Goffart simply summarizes the positions of his opponents, without providing us with direct quotes; instead he regularly paraphrases and generically comments, giving no room for alternative opinion... The author emphasizes over and over again that we really need to differentiate among the various Germanic peoples instead of talking about an attack by the Germanic barbarians as a national movement against the Romans. It seems incomprehensible to assume that any serious historian (Goffart attacks primarily German-language scholars) would hold such a position today. No one assumes that there was anything like a German nation attacking the Roman empire. This is simply in the head of the author who fights a straw puppet.""

"Walter Goffart... A Canadian, perhaps significantly of Belgian extraction... [has] gone a long way towards denying any great significance to Germanic incomers to the Roman world... It is difficult to know how important were Goffart's experiences as a Belgian refugee."

"There were no Germans until a Germany materialized little by little in the European Middle Ages. Rome faced outward toward multiple and mutually antagonistic peoples. The existence of an ancient common Germanic civilization reaching deep into the B.C. period is a learned invention of sixteenth-century Germans, based on classical sources well known to us... There was no "Germanic civilization" long ripening north and east of the imperial frontiers."

"As long ago as 1972, I expressed a wish that someone should write a history of the Migration Age detached from German nationalism... Nothing has happened since then to fill this desideratum. On the contrary, the front of the stage has been occupied by talk of "ethnogenesis" and of the importance of ethnicity in late antiquity. Philology, archaeology, comparative religion, etymology, and whatever else have been exploited in the tried and true fashion of deutsche Altertumskunde in efforts to render the "tribes" more tribal than ever. As little thought as possible has been given to making them less resolutely German... This model... found regaining strength after World War II in the Gottingen historian Reinhard Wenskus, in the Cambridge classicist A. H. M. Jones, and in hundreds of scholars outside as well as inside Germany, all agreed in seeing an existing "Germanic world" getting the better of a "Roman world." That vision of outsiders intruding successfully where they were not wanted is an illusion fostered however innocently and festering ever since the sixteenth century."

"The debate has led to an unfortunate division between Walter Goffart with his disciples, on the one side, and the so-called ‘Viennese School’ and scholars working with an ‘ethnogenesis’ paradigm, on the other. Scholars have been cast — especially by Goffart and his allies — as being either the good ones or the bad ones."

"One of the primary exponents of this relatively sunny view of the fifth-century 'transformation' has been Walter Goffart... Goffart sets out how the fragmented foreign peoples once living on the edges of the Empire participated with the Romans in the larger stirrings of late antiquity.' Rome did not fall, it experienced 'stirrings'; barbarians did not invade and conquer, foreign peoples 'participated' with the Romans in the 'stirrings'. This is the essence of the revisionist 'trans-formation and accommodation' view of the fall of Rome. This revisionist approach got a great boost from the European Science Foundation's ongoing project on The Transformation of the Roman World which, since 1995, has sponsored conferences and workshops, and published papers in a monograph series (The Transformation of the Roman World) that has now reached fourteen volumes. This project has turned the transformation-of-Rome theory into a scholarly industry. It tends to reflect the political climate of the contemporary European Union, with values such as multiculturalism, relativism, and a distaste for judgements..."

"There was no Germanic world before the Carolingian age."

"Experts in Germanic literature... solemnly assent: emigration from Scandinavia is an authentic "tribal memory"..."

"The faith in Germanic continuity has prevailed for many centuries, damaging everything it has touched: Germans and other Europeans need to be assured that they can dispense with a link to the Germanen, that there is such a thing as historical change, and that the transgressions of national pasts can indeed be outgrown."

"[[w:Herwig Wolfram|[Hewrig] Wolfram]] is listened to with approval in all countries that care about this subject."

"Superfluous... is the unthinking modern transposition into history of a common "Germanic" language family-a concept borrowed from comparative philology. The history of a language as known to philologists has nothing to do with that of human beings... No discernible benefit comes from our being reminded again and again in modern writings that many of these barbarians at each other's throats probably spoke dialects of the same language. The G-word can be dispensed with."

"When Goffart launched his theory of peaceful 'accommodation'... it fell on fertile ground. Goffart himself seems to have intended his book to play down the role of the Germanic peoples in European history... The European Union needs to forge a spirit of cooperation between the once warring nations of the Continent, and it is no coincidence that the European Science Foundation's research project into this period was entitled 'The Transformation of the Roman World'—implying a seamless and peaceful transition from Roman times to the 'Middle Ages' and beyond."

"Today, measles ranks among the most deadly of childhood infections, yet parents and guardians are walking away from protecting their children against this and other deadly diseases in unprecedented numbers. They are abandoning the option of protecting their children because of phony propaganda released by an anti-vaccine movement that began in 1968. Since then, the movement has become scary, powerful, and well organized. One aspiration of this book is to counter [those] claims... that MMR (measles, mumps-rubella) and other childhood vaccines are either unsafe or cause autism."

"The myth of the Germans before Germany is hard to suppress because, owing to its great age and genesis in the sources themselves."

"Germanic collectivity exists in linguistics but never existed anywhere else... [A]n "early Germanic world"... had no existence anywhere until it took form in the minds of scholars in sixteenth-century Europe and was thoughtlessly espoused by everyone else."

"[The] theme-the "early Germans"-is still far from being repudiated."

"The prehistoric Germans never existed... they are an illusion of misguided scholars. The nonexistence of ancient Germans is perhaps the most important thing one can say about the barbarians of late antiquity... The "Germanic world" is a damaging modern invention and usage that badly needs to be abandoned."

"[M]any scholars of today in Europe and the United States still cherish the existence of a "Germanic world" long antedating medieval and modern Germany."

"I would be content if "German" and its derivatives were banished from all but linguistic discourse on this subject."

"The adjective "German;' an umbrella term for many of the diverse northern barbarians of the late Roman period, is the key to such unifying compounds as "the Germanic world;' "Germanic migrations;' "Germanic peoples;' "Germanic style;' "Germanic law;' "Germanic grave goods": wherever it turns up it simplifies and unifies, and presides over collective actions that did not take place... "German" will not go away by itself; it has to be stubbornly shown the door."

"[[w:Gustav Kossinna|[Gustav] Kossinna's]] ideas about the early Germans, which have long circulated apart from his name, have been only superficially purged from the writings of today."

"The main goal of this book is to reform thinking and writing about the barbarians in late antiquity by driving out the anachronistic terms "German" and "Germanic" and the baggage that goes with them."

"What we call the Fall of the Western Roman Empire was an imaginative experiment that got a little out of hand."

"My central concern in the present book is... to liberate barbarian history from the German nationalism that has suffused it ever since the sixteenth century and, in whatever disguises, continues to do so today."

"Strange as it may seem to hear it said, there were no Germanic peoples in late antiquity. The illusion that there were can be outgrown."

"If Europe has had a supreme invented tradition, that of the Germans before Germany is it-so much so that most people who speak about it do not realize that they are dealing with fiction."

"[V]accines are safe and cannot possibly cause autism..."

"[D]eutsche Altertumskunde... [is a] still honored "science" of German antiquity."

"Culture, ... that standard shield of class, is allowed to surface only in order to become more evidence of ... vanity."

"The conscience exists, standing before us now asking not to be created or perfected but to be chosen and defended, in need of champions, not exiles. Any fiction which refuses that request is henceforth a collaborationist fiction."

"In the end, very like Camus, [Joseph] Heller has tried to buy time for himself and his culture, snarled with lunacy and injustice as it is, by wrapping up everything in a tissue of cynicism and privileged impotence. History being insufferable but unchangeable, he says the good man is therefore morally reprieved from the awful sentence of having to change it. In the company of Camus' solitary rebel, he need only desert."

"What Heller finally offers us super-sensitive Westerners is a contemporary world in which we may ignore what threatens us, ... a world in which the summons to partisanship has been muffled if not ridiculed by a nihilism which has recently discovered gaiety, a despair which has learned to frolic in the ruins of a certain hope."

"In a strong sense, the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate."

"When the house is burning down around the poet's head, on grounds of what if any dispensation can the poet continue the poem?"

"The first thing is deciding what the program should do. If you don’t think carefully about that, it’s going to wind up not doing something that it probably should do or you wind up with an ‘absolute bug-free program’. Because to have a bug, you have to have some notion of what it means for the program to be operating correctly. And there is no precise definition of what it means for the program to be correctly operating — so, well, no bugs. Not a very good situation."

"With so many people doing so much writing, great writing is hard to find ... If you succeed in attaining a position that allows you to do something great, if you do something that really is great, and if you realize that it’s great, there’s still one more hurdle: You have to convince others that it’s great. This will require writing."

"I think in other things that I've done, I can look back and see: "This idea developed from something else." Sometimes it would lead back to a previous idea of mine, very often it would lead to something somebody else had done. But the Bakery algorithm just seemed to come out of thin air to me. There was nothing like it that preceded it, so perhaps that's why I'm proudest of it."

"Thinking doesn't guarantee that we won't make mistakes. But not thinking guarantees that we will."

"We need to start talking about this. Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think. So how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal s. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers. These are not new ideas, but we have to stop talking about how expensive and difficult they are to implement and just get on with it."

"It might also mean greater business and government support for maternity and paternity leave and day care so that the middle class and the poor can get some of the educational benefits that the early academic intervention of the rich provides their children. Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone. The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy."

"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."

"If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves."

"But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting. High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich."

"We’ve barely given a thought to what the rich were doing. With the exception of our continuing discussion about whether the rising costs of higher education are pricing the middle class out of college, we don’t have much practice talking about what economists call “upper-tail inequality” in education, much less success at reducing it. Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile."

"Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion. Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer."

"What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially. We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform. Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families. Part of knowing what we should do about this is understanding how and why these educational disparities are growing."