Campus Quotes - page 5
In social terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one poet now asks another upon being introduced is "Where do you teach?" The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It's just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform with institutional ones.
Dana Gioia
Boys are scolded even for their violent fantasies- for the violent stories they want to hear, the violent books they want to read, the violent games they want to play. Male "demonism" is punished, pathologized, and stigmatized from cradle to campus. Even the good guys are treated like bad guys for ganging up, for being "xenophobic," patriotic, or too exclusive. Video games, fighting sports, and movies are decried for being "too violent." Football is deemed "too dangerous" by many overprotective parents. Everyone is supposed to agree that violence is never the answer- unless that violence comes from the cutting edge of the State's ax.
Jack Donovan
I know idealism is not playing on the radio right now, you don't see it on TV, irony is on heavy rotation, the knowingness, the smirk, the tired joke. I've tried them all out but I'll tell you this, outside this campus - and even inside it - idealism is under siege beset by materialism, narcissism and all the other isms of indifference.
Bono
The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let's face it. If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn't have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The administration would have cut financing and shut them down.
David Brooks
Americans may laud Charlie Hebdo for being brave enough to publish cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad, but, if Ayaan Hirsi Ali is invited to campus, there are often calls to deny her a podium. So this might be a teachable moment. As we are mortified by the slaughter of those writers and editors in Paris, it's a good time to come up with a less hypocritical approach to our own controversial figures, provocateurs and satirists. The first thing to say, I suppose, is that whatever you might have put on your Facebook page yesterday, it is inaccurate for most of us to claim, Je Suis Charlie Hebdo, or I Am Charlie Hebdo. Most of us don't actually engage in the sort of deliberately offensive humor that that newspaper specializes in.
David Brooks
At Chicago, Hayek put aside his more technical economic work for the development of a social and political theory that became in time the most ambitious and complete synthesis to emerge from the ranks of the post-war Right. Among its themes - the overriding significance of the rule of law, the need for social inequality, the function of unreflective tradition, the value of a leisured class - were many cultivated by Strauss across the campus. Neither thinker, however, ever referred to the other. Did temperamental antagonism, or intellectual indifference, dictate the silence? Whatever the case, latent tensions of outlook between them were to find expression in due course. Schmitt, on the other hand, was never far from Hayek's mind – standing for the prime example of a skilled jurist whose sophistry helped to destroy the rule of law in Germany, yet a political theorist whose stark definitions of the nature of sovereignty and the logic of party, at any rate, had to be accepted.
Friedrich Hayek
Most American audiences reacted, first, with astonishment, and second with compassion to stories of the routine horrors of a Muslim woman's life, even as they struggled to believe it was happening in their own country. There was one exception to this reaction. This was on college campuses, exactly the kind of environment where I had expected curiosity, lively debate, and, yes, the thrill and energy of like-minded activists.
Instead almost every campus audience I encountered bristled with anger and protest.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
You're supposed to get on your knees at midnight or in the early morning and tell God you repent on things you've done. You don't tell in a football stadium, "Mainstream media: you're my God, I am bad, tell me what to do.” That is sick.They're kneeling to political correctness and hating white people. They're kneeling to white genocide --- and then I don't want anybody to be genocided (sic). But everywhere it's: "Kill the whites, kill the whites.” The universities: "No whites can come on campus.” It's a bunch of weird white people going, "We need to kill all the white people.” Just everywhere. Hillary: "We lost because of white people.” It's the most racist, weird, anti-Martin Luther King crap I've ever heard. Martin Luther King would say, "You people are crazy.”.
Alex Jones
As soon as I arrived at Cornell, I became aware of Dick as the liveliest personality in our department. In many ways he reminded me of Frank Thompson. Dick was no poet and certainly no Communist. But he was like Frank in his loud voice, his quick mind, his intense interest in all kinds of things and people, his crazy jokes, and his disrespect for authority. I had a room in a student dormitory and sometimes around two o'clock in the morning I would wake up to the sound of a strange rhythm pulsating over the silent campus. That was Dick playing his bongo drums. Dick was also a profoundly original scientist. He refused to take anybody's word for anything. This meant that he was forced to rediscover or reinvent for himself almost the whole of physics. It took him five years of concentrated work to reinvent quantum mechanics. He said that he couldn't understand the official version of quantum mechanics that was taught in textbooks, and so he had to begin afresh from the beginning.
Richard Feynman
It is a welcome privilege to be in your city and on your campus here at St. Louis University. for many years your city has been widely known for baseball, basketball, the Busch family, and I am a fan of all three. But those who know St. Louis well and know it affectionately as I have for many years, since I wore my first set of Buster Brown shoes, know that the strength of this city comes from its colleges and its churches, and the courageous civic leadership of its citizens. I have little patience with those who dismiss this great region of mid-America as an intellectual desert. Those who say that don't know mid-America, don't know the Midwest and don't know St. Louis, and won't last very long in the company of Senator Symington and Senator Long!
Lyndon B. Johnson
