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7d5beb0
|
"But we're a university! We to have a library!" said Ridcully. "It adds . What sort of people would we be if we didn't go into the library?" "Students," said Senior Wrangler morosely."
|
|
library
students
university
school
|
Terry Pratchett |
|
40eb79b
|
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
|
|
work
english-literature
university
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
da0d939
|
...I'm worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialetics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking acadamese instead of English and they don't really know what's happening in the real world.
|
|
funny
elitism
english
graduate-school
intellects
long-words
pomposity
language
university
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
66b7b24
|
A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They're on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority's blessing, its validation of their chosen . The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options - neutrois, two spirit, bigender...any colour you like, Mr Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there's cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I'm easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I'll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome drugs.
|
|
social-justice
social-media
university
|
Ian McEwan |
|
9595bc6
|
"At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me. I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then"
|
|
literary-criticism
university
|
Alison Bechdel |
|
7dd10a0
|
Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, teaching had to be one of them. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and had perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all right because, to be fair, so had the students.
|
|
humor
students
university
|
Terry Pratchett |
|
753d455
|
"Firstly," said Ponder, "Mr Pessimal wants to know what we do here." "Do? We are the premier college of magic!" said Ridcully. "But do we teach?" "Only if no alternative presents itself," said the Dean. "We show 'em where the library is, give 'em a few little chats, and graduate the survivors. If they run into any problems, my door is always metaphorically open." "Metaphorically, sir?" said Ponder. "Yes. But technically, of course, it's locked." "Explain to him that we don't do things, Stibbons," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. "We are academics."
|
|
wizards
discworld
university
|
Terry Pratchett |
|
9aaa716
|
If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society... It is the education which gives a man a clear, conscious view of their own opinions and judgements, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant.
|
|
knowledge
university
|
John Henry Newman |
|
4c565d4
|
Unseen University was much bigger on the inside. Thousands of years as the leading establishment of practical magic in a world where dimensions were largely a matter of chance in any case had left it bulging in places where it shouldn't have places. There were rooms containing rooms which, if you entered them, turned out to contain the room you'd started with, which can be a problem if you are in a conga line.
|
|
wizard
university
|
Terry Pratchett |
|
2da5f58
|
An aptitude test established architecture as an alternative [career]. But what decided the matter for [Teddy Cruz] was the sight of a fourth-year architecture student sitting at his desk at a window, drawing and nursing a cup of coffee as rain fell outside. 'I don't know, I just liked the idea of having this relationship to the paper and the adventure of imagining the spaces. That was the first image that captured me.
|
|
teddy-cruz
architecture
university
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
5b5515e
|
Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a cafe makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line. There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang--which is the most favored city in the country--every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.
|
|
irony
grief
death
doublethink
drinking-the-kool-aid
graffiti
jonestown
koreans
moonies
ryugyong-hotel
jokes
indoctrination
surveillance
dissent
totalitarianism
tourism-in-north-korea
south-korea
authoritarianism
pyongyang
kim-il-sung
kim-jong-il
north-korea
propaganda
mind-control
university
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
b8e1b84
|
"Where do you find a stomach on a Thursday afternoon in Reno? "Chinatown?" suggests someone. "Costco?" "Butcher Boys." Tracy pulls his phone from a pocket. "Hello, I'm from the university" - the catchall preamble for unorthodox inquiries."
|
|
stomach
university
|
Mary Roach |
|
ec47c18
|
"Most of us are pseudo-scholars...for we are a very large and quite a powerful class, eminent in Church and State, we control the education of the Empire, we lend to the Press such distinction as it consents to receive, and we are a welcome asset at dinner-parties. Pseudo-scholarship is, on its good side, the homage paid by ignorance to learning. It also has an economic side, on which we need not be hard. Most of us must get a job before thirty, or sponge on our relatives, and many jobs can only be got by passing an exam. The pseudo-scholar often does well in examination (real scholars are not much good), and even when he fails he appreciates their inner majesty. They are gateways to employment, they have power to ban and bless. A paper on King Lear may lead somewhere, unlike the rather far-fetched play of the same name. It may be a stepping-stone to the Local Government Board. He does not often put it to himself openly and say, "That's the use of knowing things, they help you to get on." The economic pressure he feels is more often subconscious, and he goes to his exam, merely feeling that a paper on King Lear is a very tempestuous and terrible experience but an intensely real one. ...As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment were contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider."
|
|
writing
market
employment
falsehood
jobs
scholarship
college
economics
faculty
exams
university
|
E.M. Forster |
|
81e2cf7
|
What I want to get out of my college course is some knowledge of the best way of living life and doing the most and best with it. I want to learn to understand and help other people and myself.
|
|
inspirational
university
|
L.M. Montgomery |
|
06b627e
|
She has decided all university campuses are alike- the sense of possibility and stasis. She thinks this too: all graduate students, if you look closely enough, exude the same aura of privilege and poverty.
|
|
university
|
Danzy Senna |
|
de1b3d1
|
Nothing worth knowing can ever be taught in a classroom.
|
|
learning
life
university
|
Chip Kidd |
|
7620d0f
|
But at the end of the day, you can't major in Making Stuff, so it was Art by default.
|
|
university
|
Chip Kidd |
|
f4a48c6
|
Lo que quiero conseguir del curso en la universidad es algun conocimiento sobre la mejor manera de vivir la vida y sacarle el maximo y mejor provecho. Quiero aprender para entender y ayudar a otra gente y a mi misma. (...) Ese es el fin que debe tener la universidad, en lugar de producir un monton de licenciados y graduados, tan atragantados de libros y vanidad que no les queda sitio para otra cosa.
|
|
inspirational
anne-of-green-gables
make-a-difference
study
university
|
L.M. Montgomery |
|
71d90fe
|
When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruction, not because of it. This seemed to make sense. He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn't what he wanted to do.
|
|
education
how-teaching-kills-creativity
schools
schooling
teaching
university
|
Robert M. Pirsig |
|
0795283
|
Where would tourism be without a little luxury and a taste of night life? There were several cities on Deanna, all moderate in size, but the largest was the capital, Atro City. For the connoisseur of fast-foods, Albrechts' famous hotdogs and coldcats were sold fresh from his stall (Albrecht's Takeaways) on Lupini Square. For the sake of his own mental health he had temporarily removed Hot Stuff Blend from the menu. The city was home to Atro City University, which taught everything from algebra and make-up application to advanced stamp collecting; and it was also home to the planet-famous bounty hunter - Beck the Badfeller. Beck was a legend in his own lifetime. If Deanna had any folklore, then Beck the Badfeller was one of its main features. He was the local version of Robin Hood, the Davy Crockett of Deanna. The Local rumor mill had it he was so good he could find the missing day in a leap year. Once, so the story goes, he even found a missing sock.
|
|
story
life
all
and
application
atro
badfeller
beck
blend
capital
coldcats
crockett
davy
deanna
fast-foods
features
for
from
had
lifetime
local
make-up
menü
mill
moderate
once
planet-famous
size
sock
square
stall
taught
the
there
was
were
missing
year
where
he
collecting
of
hood
to
little
luxury
bounty
goes
everything
city
folklore
university
|
Christina Engela |
|
03633f9
|
"There is a whole school of thought that holds bureaucracy tends to expand according to a kind of perverse but inescapable inner logic. The argument runs as follows: if you create a bureaucratic structure to deal with some problem, that structure will invariably end up creating other problems that seem as if they, too, can only be solved by bureaucratic means. In universities, this is sometimes informally referred to as the "creating committees to deal with the problem of too many committees" problem."
|
|
committees
university
|
David Graeber |
|
e14f20e
|
And little girls went to charm schools. Now you've all got degrees from the University of Sarcasm.
|
|
women
set-in-darkness
girls
sarcasm
university
|
Ian Rankin |
|
f1f0324
|
Yet here was Morrie talking with the wonder of our college years, as if I'd simply been on a long vacation. ..I once promised I would never work for money, that I would join the Peace Corps, that I would live in beautiful, inspirational places.
|
|
live
thoughts
idealism
work
life
ideas
young
university
|
Mitch Albom |
|
17440d7
|
The fact that they were there as students presumed they did not know what was good or bad. That was his job as instructor...to tell them what was good or bad. The whole idea of individual creativity and expression in the classroom was really basically opposed to the whole idea of the University.
|
|
learning
education
schools
self-expression
teaching
university
|
Robert M. Pirsig |
|
ad5701d
|
In some quarters, and particularly among those who comment on these matters in in political circles or in the media or the blogosphere or other forms of public discussion, there is, without question, a strain of hostility and resentment likely to be encountered by anyone who attempts to characterize and emphasize the value of the intellectual life carried on in universities. Clearly, a wider anti-intellectualism feeds into this, something well charted in the US from at least Richard Hofstadter onwards and brilliantly diagnosed by Thorstein Veblen and others before that. The narrower version of this response finds it pretty outrageous for academics to criticize or complain about anything to do with universities and their support and regulation by their host society. Along with more understandable and even perhaps justifiable sources of these reactions, we do have to recognize - and here is where I know I am particularly laying myself open to misunderstanding - the force of which Nietzche termed . There is a bitterness in these reactions, a combination of anger and sneering, together with a levelling intent, that far exceeds what might seem called for by any actual disagreement about the subject matter. And if I may be allowed to risk a little sally of speculative phenomenology, I think this reaction, for all its hostility and dismissiveness, encodes a twisted acknowledgement that there is something desirable, even enviable, about the role of the scholar or the scientist. Part of the reaction, of course, involves a resentment of the supposed security of tenure in a world with very little security of employment; some of it is a sense of how much autonomy, comparatively speaking, academics have in their working lives, how much flexibility in choosing their working hours and so on, in a world where, again, most people enjoy all too little autonomy. But some of it also may be a kind of grudging acknowledgement that the matters that scholars and scientists work on are more interesting, rewarding and perhaps humanly valuable than the matter most people have to devote their energies too in their working lives. Academics are the object of, simultaneously, envy and resentment because their roles seem to allow them to deal with intrinsically rewarding matters while being financially supported by the labour of others who are not privileged to work on such matters.
|
|
intellectuals
university
|
Stefan Collini |