#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

Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#academics #art #art-history #artists #arts

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

What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults. ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#education #education

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

In almost every profession - whether it's law or journalism, finance or medicine or academia or running a small business - people rely on confidential communications to do their jobs. We count on the space of trust that confidentiality provides. When someone breaches that trust, we are all worse off for it. ↗

— Hillary Clinton

#almost #breaches #business #communications #confidential

One of the things that's great about New York is that it is not a one-industry town. It has education, academia, the service industry, arts, publishing, theater, politics, fashion, finance, as well as movie-making. ↗

— Sarah Jessica Parker

#academia #arts #education #fashion #finance

What do you call a co-worker these days? Neither teammate nor confederate will do, and partner is too legalistic. The answer brought from academia to the political world by Henry Kissinger and now bandied in the boardroom is colleague. It has a nice upper-egalitarian feel, related to the good fellowship of collegial. ↗

— William Safire

#answer #bandied #brought #call #colleague