A Quote by Kehinde Wiley
The work that I wanted to create wasn't being done then. I was too much concerned about fellow students, professors, institutional style [in Yale].
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I feel I learned as much from fellow students as from the professors.
There's something melancholy about professors because they're chronically abandoned. They form these lovely relationships with students and then the students leave and the professors stay the same. It's like they're chronically abandoned.
And then there is Pythagoras. The legend is that the founder of theoretical mathematics was so outraged when one of his students, the haplessly gifted Hippasus, discovered irrational numbers that he sent the poor fellow out on a raft to drown, initiating a venerable tradition of professors mistreating their graduate students.
I told the students [at Yale] we were going to talk about love - I meant love in the sense of devotions to one's work - and about half the students got really pissed off.
My schooling was very conservative. I went to Trinity School, and then to the Hill School, which is a boarding school, then to Yale. My parents got divorced in that period, and I realized I didn't have a life anymore. I was the only child, so a three-person family breaks apart. I ended up very conformist, very scared, very lonely. I couldn't go on with Yale, just couldn't do it. I'd been doing too much of that for too long. I didn't know what I wanted, but I knew what I didn't want, which was to go to Wall Street and join the crowd there.
We, as Yale students, pride ourselves on being bright, curious and engaged citizens. We are part of an institution that aims to educate its students to better the world. We tend to think that we do not fit the stereotype of ignorance and apathy that is all too often associated with America.
Most of these students are so conditioned to success that they become afraid to take risks. They have been taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools, and institutional authorities what constitutes failure and success. They are socialized to obey. They obsess over grades and seek to please professors, even if what professors teach is fatuous. The point is to get ahead, and getting ahead means deference to authority. Challenging authority is never a career advancer.
When I left Maine, I always wanted to be a working actor. I never cared too much about being the star. I just wanted to do the work and get on with it.
The resources at Harvard - its professors, our fellow students, the libraries, its alumni - created for me the opportunity to pursue my passions in finance.
We are all concerned about the future of American education. But as I tell my students, you do not enter the future - you create the future. The future is created through hard work.
I established relationships with so many of those Iran students that went on for years.And they were so different from American students. They seemed to worship their teachers. The professors were major to them. They wanted to give gifts, and you'd have to say, oh, no, no, you can't do that.
In some of the classes, especially the introductory religion courses I took, the professors can veer into a particular strain of religious anti-intellectualism. Professors typically aren't given tenure at Liberty, so there's pressure to hew to the party line on religious and social issues. I didn't see a whole lot of my professors encouraging critical thinking among their students. Which isn't to say that students don't engage critical thinking skills at Liberty - just that it wasn't part of my classroom experience there.
I wanted to write about women and their work, and about valuing the work we, as women, choose to do. Too many women I knew disparaged their work. Many working mothers thought they ought to be home with their children instead, so they carried around too much guilt to enjoy much job satisfaction.
So there is a personal sense of style for a given work - I don't like a general style, but every work has its own style, and I want to create a style for every work.
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.
Have I done aught of value to my fellow-men? Then have I done much for myself.
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