Top 1200 American Universities Quotes & Sayings

The trouble is not chiefly that our universities are unfit for students but that many present-day students are unfit for universities.

Most American elementary schools and high schools, and nearly all colleges and universities, teach everything that is significant from a liberal/Left perspective.

I believe that the future is determined by the great public universities. They educate 80 percent of the students and make the American Dream available.

The last publicized center of American writing was Manhattan. Its writers became known as the New York Intellectuals. With important connections to publishing, and universities, with access to the major book reviews, they were able to pose as the vanguard of American culture when they were so obsessed with the two Joes--McCarthy and Stalin--that they were to produce only two artists, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, who left town.

Universities are renowned for their tolerance of unusual characters, especially if they show originality and dedication to their research. I have often made the comment that not only are universities a 'cathedral' for worship of knowledge, they are also 'sheltered workshops' for the socially challenged.

I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.

I think part of the success which Structuralist or post-Structuralist thought in critical theory has had in literary studies in American universities is due to a theoretical vacuum.

There are a lot of universities that are as dangerous with the indoctrination of the children as terrorists are in Iran or North Korea. We have been setting up reeducation camps. We call them universities.

The strong point of American research universities is the manner in which trustees, presidents and other senior executives retain a considerable amount of decision-making authority while at the same time maintaining a culture of open exchange and participatory debate.

I almost stopped teaching entirely. The worst thing for me is contact with students. I like universities without students. And I especially hate American students. They think you owe them something. They come to you ... Office hours!

College graduates work in every sector of the American economy, and the research engines incubated within our universities generate a wealth of ideas and innovations that have an enormous impact on our lives.

The American people are among the most productive in the world. We have the best technologies. We have great universities. We have entrepreneurs.

When Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell first proposed the grants that now bear his name, he envisioned a way to help students attend our country's wonderful colleges and universities, so they could share in the American Dream.

Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion... religion is institutionalized spirituality.

I do not know how wicked American millionaires are, but as I travel about and see the results of their generosity in the form of hospitals, churches, public libraries, universities, parks, recreation grounds, art museums and theatres I wonder what on earth we should do without them.

We are in an international marketplace for talent, and American colleges and universities need to be able to attract students and faculty from around the world if we want to sustain our excellence.

There's a lot wrong [with American universities]. I'd remove 3/4 of the faculty - everything but the hard sciences. But nobody's going to do that, so we'll have to live with the defects. It's amazing how wrongheaded [the teaching is]. There is fatal disconnectedness. You have these squirrelly people in each department who don't see the big picture.

I think the anger that is being directed to universities and so-called elites at universities is actually an anger that's displaced from politicians (who promise to make things better and never do), from employers, it's an anger at the economic system that has put so many of these people out of the kind of work that once was so satisfying to them.

My American undergraduate education probably gave me a better idea of the fundamentals of what European civilization is about, better than the undergraduate education you get at most European universities.

American universities are so expensive. My family couldn't afford to send me, so I took out student loans and had to pay my own way.

The world needs real-world universities, 'doer' universities. We're going to set up one model of it in Ladakh. And if it is successful, we hope it'll have a ripple effect from New Delhi to New York.

The universities have got a job here as well in making sure that people actually understand that we're open for university students coming into the U.K. There's a job here not just for the government, I think there's a job for the universities as well to make sure that people know that we are open.

The American people are among the most productive in the world. We have the best technologies. We have - great universities. We have entrepreneurs.

We are in the presence of a recruiting drive systematically and deliberately undertaken by American business, by American universities, and to a lesser extent, American government, often initiated by talent scouts specially sent over here to buy British brains and preempt them for service of the U.S.A. ... I look forward earnestly to the day when some reform of the American system of school education enables them to produce their own scientists so that, in an aimiable free trade of talent, there may be adequate interchange between our country and theirs, and not a one-way traffic.

Already this war on gangs in California is taking money from universities to build prisons, and the universities have some clout.

American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.

Europeans forget that one-third of the American people have had a personal conversation with Jesus Christ and that the born-again are not just little old ladies in black but also CEOs and provosts of universities and candidates for office.

It's no secret that our nation's public universities want to transform American young people into a bunch of hyper-sensitive, intellectually-neutered cream puffs.

If we want to identify the great success of American research universities, and that success goes far beyond Harvard, we have to come back to the question of governance. Excellence requires a firewall between trusteeship, or government ministries, and the academic decision-making process. This American concept of shared governance wherein the faculty are engaged in running the university as part of a collaboration with the other stakeholders.

Many of these failures can be laid at the feet of the awful state of American higher education, and especially the way in which our secular universities have divorced their instruction from timeless truths like faith and freedom. Many of the professors at these places plainly don't respect the founders and, in particular, the religious foundation of the founders.

Much of the early engineering development of digital computers was done in universities. A few years ago, the view was commonly expressed that universities had played their part in computer design, and that the matter could now safely be left to industry. [...] Apart from the obvious functions of keeping in the public domain material that might otherwise be hidden, universities can make a special contribution by reason of their freedom from commercial considerations, including freedom from the need to follow the fashion.

American colleges are now increasingly reflexive in maintaining politically correct dialogue over controversy, and some say universities have lost sight of education's ultimate purpose.

I think we're vastly over-invested in universities. Universities should be relatively small and provide excellent education and research in a number of specialized areas. I think the vast majority of young people should be going through non-university, post-secondary training.

For online universities, like Liverpool and the University of Phoenix, if prices drop by 60%, they still make money. But for the vast majority of traditional universities, if the prices fall by 10%, they are bankrupt; they have no wriggle room.

After the Soviet collapse, Marxism is a relic, a pathetic anachronism reduced to its last redoubts: North Korea, Cuba, and the English departments of the more expensive American universities.

The ancient universities was not as based on how many credit hours you're taking and whether you've completed your credit hours. The ancient universities were much more interested in customized, personalized learning... Where you have a mentor and where you're learning at your own pace.

You see the one thing I've always maintained is that I'm an American Indian. I'm not a Native American. I'm not politically correct. Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans. And if you notice, I put American before my ethnicity. I'm not a hyphenated African-American or Irish-American or Jewish-American or Mexican-American.

S. J. Keyser is a shrewd and insightful observer of academe. His experiences in three universities, Brandeis, UMass, and MIT, enrich his perspectives about the way universities work, and his exploration of the culture of MIT is brilliant.

Baseball is the exponent of American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness, American Dash, Discipline, Determination, American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm, American Pluck, Persistency, Performance, American Spirit, Sagacity, Success, American Vim, Vigor, Virility.

The duty of universities is toward their nation, for which they must prepare leaders in all fields and these must be necessarily ethnically native. For it is intolerable that a nation educate for itself alien leaders in its universities.

This country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but that's not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that's not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that's not what keeps the world coming to our shores. Instead, it is that American spirit - that American promise - that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.

There are many reasons that universities in East Asia have not reached the positions that they had hoped for. After all, we must remember that modern East Asia did not begin with Confucius. In fact the experience of modern education in East Asia is relatively short and granted that time scale, many universities are doing fine.

What [American universities] need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists - all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never have too many of these, just as we can never have too few 'conservatives'.

Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.

You know there are very few Marxists left in the world... they're all in American universities.

American universities have never considered academic merit the sole criterion for admittance.

I had the great good fortune of getting my Ph.D. in the very first year that universities were actively seeking women faculty. The government was putting pressure on universities to hire more women.

Universities are an example of organizations dominated wholly by intellectuals; yet, outside pure science, they have not been an optimal milieu for the unfolding of creative talents. In neither art, music, literature, technology and social theory, nor planning have the Universities figured as originators or as seedbeds of new talents and energies.

American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.

The heads of leading American universities say that if they selected applicants based on grades alone, their student bodies would be 100 percent Asian.

I think the universities have co-opted the intellectual, by and large. But there is an emerging intellectual set coming out of Washington think tanks now. There are people who are leaving the universities and working for the government or in think tanks, simply looking for freedom.

If you don't have to pay for everything you're providing, why in the world should you cut the cost of it, when it's gonna be covered? That's what's happened to the health care system. Why cut costs when somebody's gonna subsidize whatever you charge. But there's another reason why tuitions are never gonna come down on major American universities, and that's because they are the training ground of American liberalism and radicalism. And they have to make jobs there attractive to the professors and the teachers who are gonna indoctrinate these young skulls full of mush.

I have never understood why they tried to start the revolution by taking over the universities. It should have been self-evident that the net result of success would be to close the universities but leave the nation unaffected--at least, for quite a long time. Nor do I find it easy to believe that the rebels, as intelligent as most of them were, seriously expected that they could keep the universities alive as corporate bodies, once they had control of them, if they made the fundamental alterations in organization and role that they proposed to.

Part of China's strategic planning is to make their universities among the top level of the world, and I think they understand you can't do that without the adoption of some of the principles of the great universities in the West; one of those is the ability to have free expression and discussion in the classroom.

It is difficult for Iranian scholars and universities to retain their independence and to be seen as doing so, when cultural warfare is being carried out by some of their American partners. Indeed, such irresponsible behavior basically serves to intensify suspicion and in reality decreases the opportunity for real and meaningful dialogue.

I loved American universities. In many ways, they are better organized - certainly than French universities.

Some colleges and universities in Virginia have chosen to ban concealed carry, and we believe that those universities have created more dangerous environments for their students, faculty, and staff.

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

Young people in Israel are encouraged to design, produce and sell their products from high school. Technical universities also matter. Teach and introduce entrepreneurship courses in technical universities.

Critics of American colleges typically attribute the failings of undergraduate education to a tendency on the part of professors to neglect their teaching to concentrate on research. In fact, the evidence does not support this thesis, except perhaps in major research universities.