#academia

When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth with that liquid by whose power the flowers are engendered; when the zephyr, too, with its dulcet breath, has breathed life into the tender new shoots in every copse and on every hearth, and the young sun has run half his course in the sign of the Ram, and the little birds that sleep all night with their eyes open give song (so Nature prompts them in their hearts), then, as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, folk long to go on pilgrimages. Only, these days, professional people call them conferences. The modern conference resembles the pilgrimage of medieval Christendom in that it allows the participants to indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of travel while appearing to be austerely bent on self-improvement. To be sure, there are certain penitential exercises to be performed - the presentation of a paper, perhaps, and certainly listening to papers of others. ↗

— David Lodge

#life

Materialist philosophies that treat human beings as machines or animals possess the high ground in our culture - academia, the most powerful media and many of our courts. ↗

— Marvin Olasky

#beings #courts #culture #ground #high

Academia: a contemporary version of medieval scholasticism that updates the scholarship while retaining the fanaticism of the dark ages. ↗

— Bauvard

#funny #humor #medievalism #age

A dean is the conductor of an orchestra made up entirely of composers. ↗

— Mark William Roche

#art

The fate of the young man in his headphones, who faced a jail cell that very night, did not seem such a world away from his own predicament: an anniversary party full of academics. ↗

— Zadie Smith

#beauty

The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#education #humanities #university #education

You'd think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him," said Miss Hillyard. "It didn't pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about -- but in the end it left him worse of." But that," said Peter, "was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#dishonesty #falsification #family #financial-distress #honor

It is one of the great ironies of corporate control that the corporate state needs the abilities of intellectuals to maintain power, yet outside of this role it refuses to permit intellectuals to think or function independently. ↗

— Chris Hedges

#corporatism #freedom-of-thought #death

What'll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?" demanded Miss Haydock. "Well, Eve -- it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only did it by looking fragile and pathetic at the viva. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#academia #academic-degrees #achievements #clichés #double-standards

Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research. ↗

— Brian Eno

#england