Colleges And Universities

"Some of us can remember how under the old system at Cambridge the Senior Fellows remained in college all their lives, their interests centred in the society, dining in hall everyday, sitting over the College port in the Combination Room every day. Few among the seniors, as one remembers them, were any longer capable of intellectual work."

"A penetrating observer of social problems has pointed out recently that whereas wealthy families once were the chief benefactors of the universities, now industry has taken over this role. Support of education is something no one quarrels with-but this need not blind us to the fact that research supported by pesticide manufacturers is not likely to be directed at discovering facts indicating unfavorable effects of pesticides."

"Changi became my university instead of my prison. … Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life — the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving."

"Fellows of colleges in the universities are in one sense the recipients of alms, because they receive funds which originally were of an eleemosynary character."

"...One of the ways in which all universities could contribute substantially to their home societies is by helping students obtain a better understanding of the development and interdependencies over time of our seemingly fragmented globe."

"I didn't get the point", said Pig. "That's because you've got four pounds of provolone where most people got brains!", Mark shouted, shaking his fist. "This is college, you dumb bastard. This is a place where you're supposed to argue and learn and get pissed off. You don't go around choking your buddies just because they don't happen to believe what you believe."

"My interest in Kipnis’s book was sparked initially by my own history. I was one of a small group of women who fought to bring in a sexual harassment code at my college in the late 1980s, and what I remember is how badly we felt it was needed, and how much resistance there was to the idea that clever people could also be in the habit of pinching bums, or worse. But I am also the product of a student-lecturer relationship: my brother and I, and two of our sisters, would not exist if my father had not twice married those that he taught. I’m sure my father’s behaviour was, knowing both him and the times (I am the eldest, and I was born in 1969), sometimes reprehensible. No doubt he would, and would be expected to, behave differently now. Nevertheless, it seems completely mad to me to try to outlaw relationships between what are, after all, consenting adults. Where else are people expected to meet, if not in the places where they spend most of their time? Imagine if it was decreed that theatre directors could not sleep with actors, that editors were forbidden from having affairs with writers, and that junior teachers were not allowed to fall in love with more senior staff. The very idea is absurd."

"I should have all manner of tenderness for the right of the College; they are nurseries of Religion and Learning, and therefore all donations for increase and augmentation of their revenue are to be liberally expounded."

"A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library. The library is the university."

"We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. . . . In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding... It has also resulted in the individual's leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war."

"It takes 11 guys to change the world. It takes five to change a university."

"If universities are determined to have faculty that are ideological monoliths, they can find students and private donors who are willing to indulge this indoctrination and pay for it themselves. These institutions are not entitled to a dime of taxpayer money, especially when they have displayed nothing but contempt for half of the American electorate. And taxpayers should be untroubled if these universities are unable to survive on their own. New universities will arise, and others that can meet the Sodom and Gomorrah test will reform themselves to offer an intellectually diverse and ideologically balanced education."

"[A student who had been kidnapped during a massacre at a rave shouldn’t count as a noncombatant because she was] an IDF soldier/Israeli police officer."

"One of the characteristics of the university is that it is made up of professors who train professors, or professionals training professionals. Education was this no longer directed toward people who were to be educated with a view to become fully developed human beings, but to specialists, in other that they might learn how to train other specialists. This is the danger of “Scholasticism,” that philosophical tendency which began to be sketched at the end of antiquity, developed in the Middle Ages, and whose presence is still recognizable in philosophy today."

"College-educated elites, on behalf of corporations, carried out the savage neoliberal assault on the working poor. Now they are being made to pay. Their duplicity—embodied in politicians such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—succeeded for decades. These elites, many from East Coast Ivy League schools, spoke the language of values—civility, inclusivity, a condemnation of overt racism and bigotry, a concern for the middle class—while thrusting a knife into the back of the underclass for their corporate masters. This game has ended."

"We were a small group of college friends who kept together after our course was over, and continued to share the same views and the same ideals. Not one of us thought of his future career or financial position. I should not praise this attitude in grown-up people, but I value it highly in a young man. Except where it is dried up by the corrupting influence of vulgar respectability, youth is everywhere unpractical, and is especially bound to be so in a young country which has many ideals and has realised few of them. Besides, the unpractical sphere is not always a fool's paradise: every aspiration for the figure involves some degree of imagination; and , but for unpractical people, practical life would never get beyond a tiresome repetition of the old routine."

"Transforming hereditary privilege into ‘merit,’ the existing system of educational selection, with the Big Three [Harvard, Princeton, and Yale] as its capstone, provides the appearance if not the substance of equality of opportunity. In so doing, it legitimates the established order as one that rewards ability over the prerogatives of birth. The problem with a ‘meritocracy,’ then, is not only that its ideals are routinely violated (though that is true), but also that it veils the power relations beneath it. For the definition of ‘merit,’ including the one that now prevails in America’s leading universities, always bears the imprint of the distribution of power in the larger society. Those who are able to define ‘merit’ will almost invariably possess more of it, and those with greater resources—cultural, economic and social—will generally be able to ensure that the educational system will deem their children more meritorious."

"Two universities have been founded in this country, amply endowed and furnished with professors in the different sciences; and I should be sorry that those who have been educated at either of them should undervalue the benefits of such an education."

"Being a student in the late sixties was a different experience than being one in the early sixties. For one thing, there was the draft. Neither Abbie Hoffman nor Tom Hayden nor Mario Savio had been subjected to a draft—a draft that threatened to pull students into a war in which Americans were killing and dying by the thousands. Perhaps more important, the war itself, with its cruel and pointless violence, was seen on television every night, and no matter how much they reviled it, these students were powerless to stop it. They could not even vote if they were under the age of twenty-one, though they could be drafted at eighteen. Despite all these differences, one thing, unfortunately, had not changed—the university itself. If the American university has in recent years been thought of as a sanctuary for leftist thought and activism, that is a legacy of the late sixties graduates. In 1968, universities were still very conservative institutions. Academia had enthusiastically supported World War II, moved seamlessly to full support of the Cold War, and, though starting to squirm a bit, tended to support the war in Vietnam. This was why the universities imagined their campuses to be suitable and desirable places for such activities as recruitment of executives by Dow Chemical, not to mention recruitment of officers by the military. And while universities were famous for their intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse or C. Wright Mills, a more typical product was Harvard's Henry Kissinger. The Ivy League in particular was well known as a bastion of conservative northeast elitism. Columbia University had Dwight Eisenhower as an emeritus member of its board of directors. Active members included CBS founder William S. Paley; Arthur H. Sulzberger, the septuagenarian publisher of The New York Times; his son Arthur O. Sulzberger, who would take over after his father's death later in the year; Manhattan district attorney Frank S. Hogan; William A. M. Burden, director of Lockheed, a major Vietnam War weapons contractor; Walter Thayer of the Whitney Corporation, a Republican fund-raiser who worked for Nixon in 1968; a Lawrence A. Wein, film producer, advisor to Lyndon Johnson, and trustee of Consolidated Edison. Later in the year students would produce a paper alleging connections between Columbia trustees and the CIA. Columbia and other Ivy League schools produced leaders in industry, publishing, and finance—the people behind politics, the people behind war, the very people C. Wright Mills identified in his book as "the power elite.""

"The question is frequently asked: why there is a school of theology attached to every University? The answer is easy: It is, that the Universities may subsist, and that the instruction may not become corrupt. Originally, the Universities were only schools of theology, to which other faculties were joined, as subjects around their Queen."

"Consider what it means for an institution to designate all of its faculty members as “mandatory reporters of sexual assault.” The policy effectively demands that every faculty member disclose the details of any student account of a sexual assault, whether it has been expressed in a course assignment, a classroom discussion, or a private conversation. Faculty will be required to make the disclosure to campus officials, even if the student has expressly indicated a desire not to file an official complaint. These requirements will have a chilling effect on students’ willingness to talk about difficult experiences with anyone on campus, even those experiences that may have nothing to do with sexual violence."

"There were fifteen boys that first morning. The equipment consisted of four desks about ten feet long, two tables and two chairs, a few McGuffey’s Readers, a few geographies, arithmetics and ninth-grade grammars. I was President; Mrs. Hibbard was the faculty."

"I cannot think of a more pleasant environment in this country that is most conducive to serious study than the campus of Silliman University."

"It is a privilege of mine to be here. In 2003, I was requested to be the commencement speaker for the graduating class of the University of the Philippines-Diliman. And after I gave that address, I said to myself-and this is true-the only other invitation that I will accept after UP Diliman is Silliman University. I have actually been waiting for almost three years. And I would have waited 30 more years to address you."

"I have always held the highest regard for Silliman University. I have many colleagues in UP - members of our faculty who are graduates of this institution and I am very impressed by them."

"Let me start off by admitting that I am quite nervous about giving this speech for a couple of reasons. First, because I am speaking at the distinguished Silliman University where my grandfather, John Gokongwei Sr., went to high school. I never had the chance to meet him since he passed away when my father was only thirteen. But I am very honored to be speaking on the hallowed and historic grounds where he went to school more than 80 years ago. The other reason I am nervous is because I am speaking to the 2007 graduating class of Silliman. Given your Sillimanian pedigree, the world has high expectations of you."

"Every once in a while, my mind would catch, however faintly, strains of music from long, long ago, when my elder brother, fresh from what seemed to me then a wonderful adventure in a world far from home, used to sing that sweet song with words I can still remember — "Silliman Beside the Sea."

"Often I have marveled over the far-seeing vision and crusading spirit of philanthropy that had actuated the kind soul who, in a land not his own founded this Institute to impart to our youth a culture and a faith buttressed by upright moral principles."

"Via Veritas Vita - "The Way, The Truth, The Life""

"What is it that Silliman University wears under your necktie that is your heart but which shines forth on your face? … they are Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Faithfulness, Gentleness and Self-control .. these are fruits of the Spirit …they are what Silliman wants you to wear in your hearts."