"I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University." - William F. Buckley, Jr.
"These are people with extraordinarily thin skins who want to be treated as adults but insist that Mommy, Daddy, and the dean come to their rescue instead of debating in the market of free ideas." - Alan Dershowitz, on perpetually "offended" college students
"Our educational system has degraded to the point where a bachelor's degree is functionally equivalent to an old high school diploma, and student loans have made this watered-down "college" a reality for the working poor." - Michael "Jaffo" Duff
"I think one must be careful in assuming that intellectuals have some kind of insight. In fact, if the track record of intellectuals is any indication, not only have intellectuals been wrong almost all of the time, but they have been wrong in corrosive and destructive ways." - Sander L. Gilman, U-Illinois Chicago
"John Walker "Paul" Lindh returned to the US today aboard a military plane. There are no confirmed reports whether he will accept an offered visiting professor position at Berkeley next fall." - Stephen Green
"In the alternate universe of the modern campus, any collective imbalance of wealth, education, health, happiness, or almost anything is explicable only in terms of deliberate present discrimination and systematic past oppression. Any other exegesis — cultural attitudes, individual preferences, bad personal choices and behaviors, time off for child-rearing, bad luck — is irrelevant. Indeed, to raise them is prima facie evidence of one’s own discrimination, intolerance, and racism, and can lead to the academic guillotine." - Victor Davis Hanson
"Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed." - R.S. Ingersoll
"The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can... twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape." - Irving Kristol
"It's as though you and I are a moth to a flame drawn together by forces greater than those which attract Snehal to asinine political conclusions." - Ron Leshem, to Shary
"[O]ne favorite deconstructionist idea is that, to put it bluntly, words have no meaning. I like to ask them whether they think it applies to tenure contracts, specifically theirs." - Robert Locke
"Interesting, isn't it, how many of the liberals proclaiming that it's utterly ridiculous to think that a department running 95% leftists might be, consciously or unconsciously, discriminating against those of a more right wing persuasion, find it completely obvious that if a physics department is 80% male, that must be because they're discriminating." - Megan McArdle
"...the best method of teaching anything is to rely on discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss for fifty minutes something that neither their teacher nor they know." - Nabokov
"As we all know, manipulative instructors know how to elicit the responses they want from their retarded students." - Shary Niv, gorgeous Israeli and former model
"One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that. No ordinary man could be such a fool." - George Orwell
"Good grief, shouldn’t everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That’s the difference between a university and a madrassa." - Steven Pinker
"People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don’t get the concept of a university or free inquiry." - Steven Pinker
"Throwing rocks at civilians makes you a criminal and maybe even a terrorist, and if you do so off a California overpass you will get jailed. But throwing the same rocks at Jews in Israel makes you an activist and maybe even a professor at Columbia University." - Steven Plaut
"It is ludicrous for English professors to think they have a useful contribution to make to decisions involving budgetary allocations, building programs, government relations, patent policy, investment decisions, and other key dimensions of modern university governance." - Judge Richard Posner
"Until the academic Left faces up to the evil at the center of its own history, it will completely fail to understand why “anti-intellectualism” is common even among people who find Christian “moral values” argument as off-putting as I do." - Eric S. Raymond
"Stupidity is man's natural state, and the PoMo dominated Studies departments have perfected it to its most loquacious and unintelligible degree. We, the intellectual proletariat need to overthrow the politically correct elite that control the means of publication." - Razib
"[I]f I were to hang up a Nazi flag in my office, I expect that the reaction would be rather harsh; if I were to hang up a Soviet flag, on the other hand, I would be just one of many professors decorating his office that way. To me, both regimes - brutal police states that crushed and killed their opposition - are equally repugnant. Why don’t more people feel that way?" - Glenn Harlan Reynolds
"I'm changing my major to Women's and Gender Studies. As my undergrad thesis, I'll write The Angry White Chick and her place in America post-modernist culture. Halfway through the second page I'll say 'all this writing is making my vagina angry,' proceed to cover the rest of the page with Spaghetti-O's, and submit it to my advisor." - Julianne Shelby (Williams '06)
"The claim is often made that the SAT is 'culturally biased.' But life itself is culturally biased. If you can't handle math and the English language, you are in big trouble." - Thomas Sowell
"On campus, thinking thoughts that are different from the mainstream culture would be very difficult. Trying to get laid as a conservative must really limit your options." - Harry Stein
"The ability to think rationally is pretty rare, even in prestigious universities." - Neal Stephenson
"I really don't mind that approximately 98% of Berkeley chooses to speak with a buzzing hive mind of stupidly cherished progressive platitudes. That's fine with me, really. This place is the way it is because every die-hard non-thinker who is terrified at the prospect of being disagreed with chose to flee the real world and settle in this carefully protected and maintained anti-reality where the only purpose of discussion is to reinforce one's own beliefs among a group of people who have also come to the conclusion that Bush is Hitler and Michael Moore spews gospel from his mouth like he does methane from his ass." - Russell Wardlow
"[O]ne has only to look at the language of deconstructionism and post-modernism to realize that the goal of the professional intellectual is to take any problem or issue that might exist in the real world, and try to reduce it to language. Once this troublesome reality can be corralled into nothing more than a linguistic debate they are in their sole area of competence and actually have a chance to win something for once in their lives." - Bill Whittle
"These people, down below, arguing endlessly in the chartroom – they have a word for themselves that they find flattering. They call themselves intellectuals. I considered myself one, and believed all manner of mental pudding until I got a little experience, and as a result of opening that window on life, I am far less intellectual and immeasurably more intelligent." - Bill Whittle
"College campuses are home to elitists who are out of touch with and have contempt for American values.... Americans as donors and taxpayers have been far too generous with the higher education establishment. It's about time we stop paying for campus anti-Americanism and academic dishonesty. Nothing opens the closed minds of college administrators more than the sounds of pocketbooks snapping shut." - Walter Williams