harvard-university-staff

"As our race has advanced in civilization, owing its progress to a more and more rigid division of labor, with the attendant and ever increasing specialization by which each piece of the great machine does its work more perfectly, yet more and more completely loses its direct touch with all but a few of the other parts, most men have lost much of what was at first common to all; and this, perhaps, quite as true as of a knowledge of plants as of anything else."

"The development of any department of science is closely connected with its power of interesting men."

"If one could only go on and on with original work…, life would be a most beautiful dream; but you…use most of your available time preparing the work of others for publication"

"Labor honestly, conscientiously, and steadfastly, and recognition and success must crown your efforts in the end.”"

"While we cannot maintain that in everything woman is man’s equal, yet in many things her patience, perseverance, and method make her his superior"

"I am immediately told that I receive an excellent salary as women’s salaries stand.…Does he ever think that I have a home to keep and a family to take care of as well as the men?…And this is considered an enlightened age!"

"My home life is necessarily different from that of other officers of the University since all housekeeping cares rest on me, in addition to those of providing the means to meet their expenses. My son Edward…knows little or nothing of the value of money and, therefore, has the idea but that everything should be forthcoming on demand"

"Building a scientific edifice is a bit like building a cathedral, stone by stone. Shaping each stone—each single study—is hard work but immensely satisfying, especially knowing that it will be durable. (P. 38)"

"Science is often associated with complicated instruments and questions so specialized that a PhD is required even to become interested. (P. 31)"

"I was offended by the New Atheist movement, which included the public intellectuals Sam Harris (The End of Faith, 2004) and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great, 2007), in addition to Dawkins and Dennett with their evolutionary credentials. In part I was offended by the poor scholarship of the books, which meant that Dawkins and Dennett were falsely trading on their academic reputations. The fact that the books were written for the general reader wasn’t an excuse. The New Atheists clearly began with animosity toward religion and constructed their arguments to support their predetermined conclusion. (P. 33)"

"Around this world and to this very day, among experts and novices alike, say the word “evolution” and most people hear the word “genes.” (P. 19)"

"...[A] new breed of philosopher was coming close to declaring that nothing in philosophy makes sense except in the light of evolution. (P. 26)"

"New challenges driven by evolving global technology inspire fresh trends and approaches in teaching statistics in business schools of the 21st century."

"While we cannot say that the military is explicitly targeting Palestinian civilians, functionally and rhetorically we may be watching an ethnic cleansing operation that could quickly devolve into genocide, as has happened more than once in the past."

"Israeli military operations have created an untenable humanitarian crisis, which will only worsen over time. But are Israel’s actions — as the nation’s opponents argue — verging on ethnic cleansing or, most explosively, genocide? As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. That means two important things: First, we need to define what it is that we are seeing, and second, we have the chance to stop the situation before it gets worse. We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time."

"It is clear that the daily violence being unleashed on Gaza is both unbearable and untenable. Since the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas — itself a war crime and a crime against humanity — Israel’s military air and ground assault on Gaza has killed more than 10,500 Palestinians, according to the , a number that includes thousands of children. That’s well over five times as many people as the more than 1,400 people in Israel murdered by Hamas. In justifying the assault, Israeli leaders and generals have made terrifying pronouncements that indicate a genocidal intent. Still, the collective horror of what we are watching does not mean that a genocide, according to the international legal definition of the term, is already underway. Because genocide, sometimes called “the crime of all crimes,” is perceived by many to be the most extreme of all crimes, there is often an impulse to describe any instance of mass murder and massacre as genocide. But this urge to label all atrocious events as genocide tends to obfuscate reality rather than explain it."

"My greatest concern watching the Israel-Gaza war unfold is that there is genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action."

"...If there is, to my mind, blame, the blame is in the 1930s and the blame is when millions of people were trying to escape regimes that were saying that they would like to be rid of them. And countries like the Unites States said, well, we have no room, but the United States then had half the population that it has today, so obviously it did have some room. And Hitler at the time was saying, well, nobody wants them so we’ll take care of it. That, I think, is the point. And if you want to learn anything, any sort of lesson from all that, to me there is one important lesson, that when you can identify people who are in need, who are in danger and you just shut your eyes, close your ears and say I don’t want to know about them, then you are signing a death warrant."

"If we truly believe that the Holocaust taught us a lesson about the need — or really, the duty — to preserve our own humanity and dignity by protecting those of others, this is the time to stand up and raise our voices, before Israel’s leadership plunges it and its neighbors into the abyss. There is still time to stop Israel from letting its actions become a genocide. We cannot wait a moment longer."

"Eggleston was a man of his time, the 1960s. In the 1960s, street photography was at its zenith, and Pop Art dominated painting and sculpture. Eggleston fused elements of both street photography and Pop Art into his oeuvre. Like Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, and Stephen Shore, Eggleston shot from the hip, blending the new apolitical snapshot aesthetic with the older and more traditional stylings of Cartier-Bresson."

"You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too... I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I've never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something."

"William Eggleston, the pioneer of colour photography shocked the art world in 1976 with his exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and his accompanying book, William Eggleston's Guide. The exhibition validated colour photography as a legitimate artistic medium. Alongside his friends and Gary Winogrand, Eggleston is regarded as one of the most inventive and radical photographers of modern times. His reputation continued to grow with the publication of The Democratic Forest in 1989, an epic drawn from, over ten thousand prints, with, an introduction by Eudora Welty. It was described by The New York Times as the first masterpiece of colour photography. Eggleston has always lived in Mississippi and Memphis. His work is deeply rooted in the South, but he transcends the label of Southern artist. His range is international. This book, published to coincide with an exhibition originating at Barbican Art Gallery in London, is the first time work from his whole career has been gathered to form a coherent sequence. It follows a course of ancient and modern from Mississippi to Louisiana and into Elvis Presley's mansion Graceland, through the oil rigs in Tennessee and the orchards of the Transvaal, to the slopes of Mount Kenya and down the Nile, with the collection ending on the lyrical imagery of the English rose. The cumulative effect of Eggleston's startling work reinforces his reputation as a major American artist, whose significance extends beyond the world of photography."

"The myth makes it bigger but when you go in there, you know where you are. I've been in many places bigger than that and it ain't the same."

"For an activity to qualify as an instance of independent learning it must exhibit learner control over the direction of learning efforts, even if this is temporarily submerged in order to acquire specific skills."

"The independent learners in the sample surveyed were seen to adopt a number of possible learning styles, to engage in a planning of intermediate and terminal learning goals; to generate subjective and objective indices of evaluation and to devise patterns of problem solving. They were adept at using existing information sources to their advantage and created learning networks of fellow enthusiasts for the exchange of advice and information."

"We are facing a climate catastrophe...The discourse might be going in the right direction, but our actions are going in, decidedly, the wrong direction. (page xi)"

"It's hard to mobilize to fight without a vision of the kind of social change you want, and when you have that vision, it's hard not to mobilize to bring it about. The proposals put forth by the degrowth movement, the buen vivir movement, and the Green New Deal for Europe for an economic slowdown predicated on redistribution and social justice have begun to make that alternative vision much more concrete. Youth, and communities on the front lines, already experiencing the ravages of the warming climate, are bringing increasing popular and political urgency to the dire warnings of scientists. (page 185)"

"The failure of several decades of top-down reforms, from the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 through the Paris Agreement of 2015, to make any serious dent in our ever-increasing global emissions should be evidence enough that our current institutions are not capable, on their own, of imagining or enacting the kind of changes we need. (p 184)"

"It is especially youth worldwide who are proving willing to acknowledge and mobilize for the kind of deep structural change that we need. Like the inhabitants of Third World countries and especially small island nations, they know that they are, and will be, the victims of others' policies and insouciance. (page 179)"

"The world's most powerful governments and corporations will not act if they are not pressured from below. (p 181)"

"We need to bring issues together because we need to bring people together to build the power necessary to create change. (page 140)"

"Justice matters for its own sake, but I've tried to show here that social, racial, and economic injustice are tightly bound with the history and institutions that have led us to the brink of climate disaster. Our world continues to be shaped by ideologies and practices of progress rooted in Europe's colonial expansion and exploitation of the resources and labor of people of color in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Europeans destroyed traditional lifeways and displaced, dispossessed, and enslaved people of color in their drive to build a new industrialized world based on ever-intensifying extraction of the planet's resources. (page 139)"

"We need to understand the system in order to change it. (page 140)"

"Confronting climate change means understanding how we got to this point, and challenging some of the basic ways our society and economy are organized. (page xvii)"

"We need to change our economy and our politics if we want to shift to a low-emissions society-our economy because we need to create a system of production that prioritizes human needs rather than increasing consumption, and our politics, because to make this change, we need to take control from a corporate system that has every interest in perpetuating itself. (page 30)"

"Climate justice means recognizing climate change as a moral, political, and economic issue that requires fundamentally reorganizing our global society and economy, not just a question of tweaking incentives and adding technologies. (p 180)"

"The framework of the Green New Deal gives us some radical, concrete, aspirational, yet achievable goals to fight for. A degrowth approach can liberate us to imagine a different, low-carbon, more just, and better world. (page 179)"

"... Given a problem, a difficulty, a maladjustment between the individual and his environment, thinking occurs. If every instinctive act brought satisfaction, thinking would be much less necessary and much less frequently practised."

"... Perhaps Faith and Hope and Love will build the City of God among us. Along with Works. And the works will keep us too busy for mere irony or rebellion or despair."

"... In the vocabulary of medieval thinking all knowledge and science were identical. The end of man was blessedness, and knowledge guided by faith was the avenue to eternal felicity."

"It took a very considerable time for education in art to be regarded as a legitimate part of school training and even many celebrated universities until the last generation had no such thing as a department of fine arts. Even the departments of literature were suspicious of the plastic arts, for men of letters with some notable exceptions have never been at home in the realm of the visual or of the tangible. When art education did finally achieve recognition, it failed to be considered even in unharassed times as being quite on a level of seriousness with even the other liberal arts, or with the physical sciences or with the new and educationally fashionable social studies."

"One must be cautious about contributing to a sort of Indological McCarthyism whereby anyone reconsidering or challenging long- held assumptions pertaining to the Indo-Aryans is instantly dubbed a fundamentalist or nationalist or, more drastically, is accused of contributing to Nazi agendas. There is a tendency in Western, and in elements of Indian, academic circles to a priori stereo- type everyone reconsidering this aspect of Indian history in such ways"

"Since there is a tendency to stereotype any local reconsiderations of ancient Indian history whatsoever as nationalist or communal, the purpose of this chapter is to suggest that a wide variety of motives inspire Indian scholars to revisit the topic of Indo-Aryan origins: it is erroneous to lump them all into a simplistic, hastily identified and easily demonized Hindutva category."

"Scholars such as Renfrew and Gamkrelidze and Ivanov can radically challenge established Indo-European homeland theories in the West, but the academic culture in India has developed to the point that anyone attempting to even question established paradigms in early South Asian history is in danger of being dubbed a Nazi. Such a culture has been created as much by remarks made in a generic fashion by some of the opponents of the Indigenous Aryan school as by the bigoted statements of certain Hindu nationalist "Indigenists." It is obviously unconducive to the pursuit of impartial scholarly research that is making at least some effort to be objective."

"In a progressive academic context, differences of opinions, however radical, challenge scholars to constantly reexamine their views, assumptions, and methods. This is the lifeline of healthy scholarship. But in the present academic climate in the subcontinent, it has become increasingly difficult, particularly for Indian scholars, to discuss the pre- history of the subcontinent in a rational, objective way without becoming associated with the ideologies that are immediately correlated with pro- or contra- stances for or against the Indigenous Aryan issue. This works to the obvious detriment of expanding and developing a nuanced understanding of the early history of the subcontinent."

"Casting off the legacies of colonialism opens up exciting new possibilities for the understanding of Indian protohistory, provided the constraints of the colonial period are not replaced with an equally constraining insistence on a different ideologically driven reading of the historical evidence, whatever that ideology might be."

"This all goes to show that ideological analysis, while indispensable in a historiographical study such as this, must refrain from straitjacketing individuals into convenient and easily identified stereotypes or groupings."

"This is not the place to dwell on these debates, as important as they are. We will find a good overview in the very well informed and very balanced book by Edwin Bryant which, moreover, demonstrates that, all things considered, no scientific argument allows us to choose between the theses of Indian or extra-Indian origin of the Āryas and, consequently, of the Indo-Europeans... To anyone who doubts the fact that the commonly accepted opinion in the West on the origin of i-e language peoples is based primarily on an intuition that is difficult to demonstrate, I would recommend reading E. Bryant's book. We can clearly see that the debate resurfaces from generation to generation."

"But attention must also be given to the possibility that, in addition to the Indigenist discourses of the nationalists, there might be many other scholars who sincerely believe that the Aryan invasion theory is a seriously flawed historical construct produced by biased imperial powers with overt agendas of their own—in other words, that it was, and is, perceived as "bad history." Consideration must also be given to the perception of many Indian scholars that Europeans might have constructed the idea of an external home of the Aryans to "pander to a false sense of national pride" of their own. No doubt voices challenging the theory of Aryan invasions were, and are, often co- opted and even, in certain cases, initiated and sponsored by nationalist and communal elements, but a wide range of motives have inspired Indian scholars to challenge the idea of Aryan invasions or migrations. Not all historical "revisionism," by which I in- tend the literal meaning of the word in the sense of "reexamination," is necessarily nationalist nor, most certainly, communal a priori. Perhaps the use of the term ^revisionism would illustrate the point: let us not forget that it was Europeans who originally "re- vised" India's Brahmanical notions of history and then imposed their version of events on their subjects. While I do not intend to minimize or gloss over the importance of this issue to Hindu nationalism, my reading of the Indigenous Aryan school is that its concerns are also to a great extent anti-imperial and anticolonial: it is determined to review the revision. Not all who share this concern are necessarily also impelled to find reason to consider themselves the original inhabitants of India so as to enhance their social legitimacy vis-a-vis other communities on the subcontinent."

"In my view, the references connected with the fourth millennium B.C.E. date, although intriguing, are too speculative to be used as substantial evidence. In the post- 2500 B.C.E. period, however, the quality and quantity of references supporting the position of the sun in Krttika at the vernal equinox are more substantive. They should be given due consideration as a serious possibility. They are as valid a chronological indicator as anything else that has been brought forward to date the Vedic texts. But they cannot win the day in and of themselves without additional, outside support."