Columbia University Faculty

"time is not on the side of a country like Jamaica. The world economy is evolving in both technical and structural terms at an incredible pace. Our ability to maintain and if possible increase our position within that framework will be largely determined by our success in education. The commitment has been made to treat education as the central social priority of the 1990s. The old sterile debate about whether education is a right or a privilege has long since been overtaken by a new reality. The training of the young is the critical investment in a nation's future and its capacity to provide a better life for its people. The attempt is now being made to persuade an entire nation to understand this fact and to commit the resources necessary to do the job."

"Any realistic vision of change must be based on the notion of empowerment of people."

"…all sorts of things that don’t even look political got mixed up with the 1970s and the new politics. So, that was how, when I came here, how I viewed Mr. Manley and Woodside. Anything that was out of the current order then was now possible. As if Mr. Manley had shattered some sort of glass globe and people could go inside and take what ideas they felt like having. It was really quite revolutionary, if unstructured."

"The more that I have thought about the morality of politics, the more there has emerged for me a single touchstone of right and wrong; and the touchstone is to be found in the notion of equality...The more I have thought, therefore, about social organization, the more I have concluded that here is only one supreme, moral imperative that cannot be affected by time, by circumstance, by the seasons, by man's moods or intellectual distractions, by the injunctions of philosophers or the sermons of pastors; and it is the notion that social organization exists to serve everybody or it has no moral foundation. (Introduction)"

"Novelty, originality, and creativity have no value if their products do not correspond to truth, to the contrary, they are harmful when they lead to false assertions.... We must separate our valid knowledge, that is documentable and objective from our religious, political and ideological preferences."

"Еvery intellectual in emigration, without exception, is damaged."

"In my view, the task of the scholar is to learn, to criticize, and, wherever possible, to add to the store of valid knowledge."

"Ideas can only be met by ideas, and force by force."

"Aims, methods, and persistency, are common to the medical profession of all countries. On its flag is inscribed what should be the life rule of all nations: Fraternity and solidarity."

"With one exception, all he cared about was the ideas: if Harrison thought you had a good idea, he would treat you like you had won the Nobel prize even if you were “just” a grad student; and if he thought your idea was rubbish he would tell you exactly that even if you *had* won the Nobel prize. The one exception was that he also, in spite of his gruff and sometimes rude demeanor, really cared for his people."

"...What I learned from him is that the thorniest problems are the most interesting ones, and also to avoid easy answers. Harrison was no fan of well-tried methods (including his own, once they became widespread) and stock explanations, sending us--meaning the students who worked with him most closely--on an unrelenting quest for something innovative."

"...On the second day of graduate studies, Harrison walks into my windowless cubicle and asks if I want to be on his payroll. I say, ”Sure” and he walks out. A few weeks go by. I get my first paycheck, and start wondering what I am supposed to do. I get up the courage to go to his two room corner office suite a floor below and ask. He answers, “If you have to ask what to do, I don’t want you working for me.” I say, “OK” and walk out."

"Eric M. Leifer,"

"[Structure does not] just sit there, constrain­ing actors by its formal characteristics, but recurrently poses problems to the actors, to which they must respond”. [At the same time, structure also provides a range of problem solving options for actors that will] generate both personal satisfaction and social respect."

"Tasting of the sweet damp woods and of the rain one inch above the meadow: It was like feasting upon air."

"Thinking of you this evening, I think of mystery; I think of umbrellas of crystal Shading a cinnamon sea;"

"And life is a rain-swept mirror Through which perpetually A girl with bright hair flowing, Dappled dark coat blowing, Into the unknown, knowing, Walks with me."

"Not ringed but rare, not gilled but polyp-like, having sprung up overnight— These mushrooms of the gods, resembling human organs uprooted, rooted only on the air,"

"Now touch the air softly, Step gently. One, two... I’ll love you till roses Are robin’s-egg blue; I’ll love you till gravel Is eaten for bread, And lemons are orange, And lavender’s red."

"And I’ll love you as long As the furrow the plow, As However is Ever, And Ever is Now."

"I know a place all fennel-green and fine Far from the white ice cap, the glacial flaw, Where shy mud hen and dainty porcupine Dance in delight by a quivering pawpaw;"

"The lariat snaps; the cowboy rolls His pack, and mounts and rides away. Back to the land the cowboy goes."

"The long-haired Yak has long black hair, He lets it grow — he doesn't care. He lets it grow and grow and grow, He lets it trail along the stair. Does he ever go to the barbershop? NO! How wild and woolly and devil-may-care A long-haired Yak with long black hair Would look when perched in a barber chair!"

"He hangs in the hall by his black cravat, The ladies faint, and the children holler: Only my Daddy could look like that, And I love my Daddy like he loves his Dollar."

"A silver-scaled dragon with jaws flaming red Sits at my elbow and toasts my bread. I hand him fat slices, and then, one by one, He hands them back when he sees they are done."

"We don’t exclude the possibility of contacts between the ancient Indo-Europeans and their Caucasian contemporaries, but no precise trace has so far been brought forward. The structural similarities that one may envision for a very distant period would not imply a common origin nor a period of symbiosis."

"Fineman is a truly generative and transformative scholar, spurring people to think in new ways about key terms like dependency, mautonomy, and vulnerability and about basic institutions such as the family and the state."

"... if you look at the way cities behave, they are parasitic on landscape. In every aspect of whatever they need, they get it from some other place ..."

"Trees sequester carbon, harvest water, produce food, and convert sunlight into energy. Those are the four characteristics I would love a city to have. The resiliency of forests is to be emulated. And that’s the reason why I picked forests as my biomimic. I want my city to be as resilient as Earth’s s. The main reason why is occurring is to make room for farms. Before there was farming, which was about ten to twelve thousand years ago, we had six trillion trees. We now have three trillion trees. We’ve cut down half of the Earth’s ability to capture carbon. We’re not going to replace all of that with new trees. But if we got back up to five trillion trees, let’s say, simply by leaving the remaining forests alone and letting them repopulate and selectively harvesting, the Earth’s temperature rise would begin to slow down. And, once you’ve slowed it down, that gives you time to reflect and to prepare for these changes that are not going to go away. Replacing three trillion trees by planting them—that’s not going to work. We’ll never be able to do that. So we have to let nature do that part. And, in order to do that, we have to return a lot of farmland back to what it used to be, which was forests."

"Despommier's writing is conversational and fun. He quotes Mark Twain and shares “inside” stories (did you know, for example, that once contracted at a restaurant in New York and later banked a hefty sum for his tsouris?). Despommier also pays homage to early giants of parasitology and the late , a superb spinner of parasite tales known to many members."

"... People tire of being taken advantage of. Some commit their lives to reforming city politics, and others work on technological solutions that benefit both humankind and . The latter efforts have led to (1) the development of efficient, affordable renewable-energy strategies; (2) carbon-capturing, recyclable construction materials with low s; (3) cost-effective atmospheric water-harvesting methods; and (4) productive vertical farms situated within the city. issues are now front and center on many city council agendas. I call these four applications of technology the four pillars of sustainability."

"Time Line for 1937 – Discovered in Uganda in the . Mistaken at first for 1951 – Israeli scientists determine the conditions for transmission from the perspective of mosquitoes. Temperature vrs. 1973 – Biggest outbreak in history in South Africa – 3,000 people sick. Hot and dry conditions followed by heavy rains 1999 – West Nile Virus first introduced in USA. Hottest, driest summer on record. 2010 – West Nile virus now an endemic infectious disease of and people. Yearly outbreaks common. All dependent on hot, dry weather, followed by a rain event"

"Ever since we became a species, some 200,000 years ago, s have been responsible for untold amounts of human suffering and countless deaths. For instance, some experts believe that Homo sapi­ens almost became extinct as the result of epidemics caused by malaria that coincided with a time when our numbers were perhaps as low as 400,000 individuals. The worst part is that this killer is still with us. In just over the past one hundred years, as many people have died from worldwide as now live in the United States. While the number of people dying from this one parasite is high, consider the fact that ma­laria in all its forms (there are four) infects some two billion individuals each year. This reduces the mortality rate to around 1 percent, making this group of infectious agents some of the most successful parasites on the planet."

"mainly differ amongst each other in terms of the technological methods used to grow edible plants indoors. 1. The first one, , consists of growing plants on a neutral and inert substrate (e.g. sand, clay, and rock material), which is regularly irrigated by a liquid fortified with minerals and nutrients that are necessary to sustain plant growth. Hydroponic systems use 60-70% less water than traditional outdoor agriculture. They are widely employed by hundreds of thousands of commercial greenhouses and vertical farms throughout the world. 2. The second process of vertical farming is , through which plants are grown without the use of any soil (or soil replacement): their roots, hanging down in the air inside a closed container, are exposed to a fine mist of nutrient-laden water, regularly sprayed through a nozzle. While this is a relatively new method for growing edible plants – it was first developed in 1983 – it is increasingly employed by commercial vertical farms such as and Tower Garden in the US. 3. Finally, a hybrid method, , integrates fish production into the hydroponic growing scheme. More precisely, it uses fish waste as a nutrient source for the plants after treatment, operating as a closed loop ecosystem for indoor farming. However, this system’s complexity and high cost hinder its widespread use. The former two methods are the most common forms of ."

"Sustainable urban life is technologically achievable, and most important, highly desirable. For example, food waste can easily be converted back into energy employing clean state-of-the-art incineration technologies, and wastewater can be converted back into drinking water. For the first time in history, an entire city can choose to become the functional urban equivalent of a natural ecosystem. We could even generate energy from incinerating human feces if we so desired. We have the ability to create a "cradle to cradle" waste-free economy. All that is needed is the political will to do so. Once we begin the process, cities will be able to live within their means without further damaging the environment."

"Both Joyce and Proust give the same impression, that they have penetrated into reaches of the inner life of men and presented them with far more actuality than has been done before."

"The last time I saw W. B. Yeats was in June 1938, in his house outside Dublin. He came into the room with his well-remembered, eager step, speaking in his well-remembered, eager voice. But he was changed. Old age that had left him so long untouched was making inroads on his physique. The old energy now came only in flashes. One of his eyes was covered with a black patch; it was blind, and he could use only one eye. ‘We are both changed,’ he said, examining me with his one eye. ‘You were once my ideal of a youthful nihilist.’ ... This was what he used to say to me in my student days when I was so delighted to be Yeats’s ideal of anything that I didn’t care what the word meant. Nihilism was the romantic form of revolt in Yeats’s early days; his friend, Oscar Wilde, had made a first play about Vera, the girl-nihilist. ... I think, vaguely, in his mind it represented a youthful fighting spirit that went with reading Russian novels, , and Nietzsche. To attribute to anyone a fighting spirit was Yeats’s most heartfelt compliment."

"... In 1911, she established the monthly intellectual journal the Irish Review, with Padraic Colum, David Houston, , and . As an editor, Collum published her own articles, as well as work by , , and , until the Review ceased publication in 1914. Along with and other women nationalists, she also helped found , an auxiliary of the , and fought for women's suffrage."

"Transformation in meaning perspective is precipitated by life’s dilemmas which cannot be resolved by simply acquiring more information, enhancing problem solving skills or adding to one’s competencies. Resolution of these dilemmas and transforming our meaning perspectives require that we become critically aware of the fact that we are caught in our own history and are re-living it and of the cultural and psychological assumptions which structure the way we see ourselves and others."

"We all require the meaning perspectives prescribed by our culture, but we have the potentiality of becoming critically aware of our perspectives and of changing them. By doing so, we move from an uncritical organic relationship to a self-consciously contractual relationship with individuals, institutions and ideologies. This is a crucial developmental task of maturity."

"The speech of the Irish country-people is fine material for the dramatist, and the Irish dramatists have made good use of it. 's dialogue reproduces the energy and the extravagance of the people's speech— ..."

"The editor is seated with a countrywoman at the door of her cottage in an isolated place. Three young girls on their way to a dance come along. They adjust their head-shawls, showing off a little. "They are pretty girls," the editor says to the householder. "If they were hanged for their beauty, they'd die innocent," is her reply. This is a real piece of wit. She did not want to contradict one who is her guest. He has shown, however, that his standard of beauty leaves something to be desired. Her judgment of the beauty under consideration is reasonable, but the expression of it is imaginative. When one puts imagination at the service of criticism, the result is apt to be a piece of malice, and Irish wit is often malicious. An illustration in a Dublin journal shows two farmers seated on a boundary fence. "I don't see a gap in the moon tonight," one says; and the other answers, "If you did you could let your cows in through it." This strikes at the farmer who would save forage by letting his cows into his neighbor's field through a gapped fence."

"... a devout man with a great love of the earth. He has also a fine sense of the traditional ballad."

"Education cannot be defined by a simplistic preoccupation with fostering direct behavior change, which in many cases exemplifies the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The most significant behavior changes may be functions of perspective transformation, and such transformation is often an essential precondition for meaningful behavior changes."

"The egregious error of adult educators is to define our function solely as one of fostering behavior change and to act as though we believe our principal tasks are to do needs assessment surveys, to communicate ideas and to design exercises to develop specific knowledge, skills or attitudes for prescribed behavior change. Not only does this effort often become indoctrination to engineer consent, but it frequently addresses the wrong reality to begin with."

"Ireland is a country that has two literatures—one a literature in ——that has been cultivated continuously since the eighth century, and the other a literature in English—Anglo-Irish literature—that took its rise in the eighteenth century. Anglo-Irish literature begins, as an English critic has observed, with Goldsmith and Sheridan humming some urban song as they stroll down an English laneway. That is, it begins chronically in that way. At the time when Goldsmith and Sheridan might be supposed to be strolling down English laneways, Ireland, for all but a fraction of the people, was a Gaelic-speaking country with a poetry that had many centuries of cultivation."

"An education that is devoid of ethics is empty and meaningless and will produce smart but reckless human beings."

"The benefits to society of having an intelligent and articulate citizenry are priceless; they cannot be measured in terms of GDP per capita or literacy rates or productivity"

"We need to start the conversation at primary school level. At the core of an academic mind is curiosity, and curiosity cannot be taught - it can only be nurtured."

"People don’t know how much money is made in telling black women that they need straight hair"