I went to Glasgow and I was the only woman doing Physics. And every time I entered the lecture theatre, as was the tradition, the guys whistled, stamped, cat-called, banged their desks. And I had to learn not to blush. Because if you blush they do it more noisily. It also had an isolating effect – it was them and me. I was rather on my own the whole time. Beautiful Minds: Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, BBC 2010
When I first came here [Cambridge] I used to walk out past these gates and wall, out of historic Cambridge and into another and very different Cambridge. You can feel almost at once the change in the atmosphere. A different feel, a different sound in the air. This again is crossing a border. Raymond Williams, Border Country, BBC 1970
A black robe, which is black for Saturn, the god of Hebrews. And the square mortar board. The square mortar board – of course Freemasons use mortar boards for their plaster. So that’s why you wear a square mortar board when you become an alumni. It all has to do with freemasonry. It all has to do with the control of education in this country, the control of our religious thinking, our minds, our government, our money, our lives, everything. Jordan Maxwell, Matrix of Power
The discipline of colleges and universities in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
A university should be a place of light, of liberty and of learning. Benjamin Disraeli
I don’t think one ‘comes down’ from Jimmy’s university. According to him, it’s not even red brick, but white tile. John Osborne, Look Back in Anger, 1956
To the university of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College: they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life. Edward Gibbon, 1737-94, Memoirs of My Life ch3
Their dull and deep potations excused the brisk intemperance of youth. ibid. re dons
Cambridge has seen many strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk and Porson sober. It is now destined to see a batter scholar than Wordsworth and a better poet than Porson betwixt and between. A E Housman, speech 29th March 1911
Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to a university? Neil Kinnock, later plagiarized by Joe Biden
One of the things you may miss at the Open University is the experience of actually being a student. This course is designed to fill that gap. Spitting Image s1e12, ITV 1984
Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation. Francis Bacon, Valerius Terminus of the Interpretation of Nature
Believe it or not, I was just given an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Tennessee. Dolly Parton
I once calculated that I did about one thousand hours work in the three years I was at Oxford. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 1991
I was not a good student. I did not spend much time at college: I was too busy enjoying myself. Stephen Hawking
As students face a hike in tuition fees we investigate the real education gravy train. Dispatches: Cashing in on Degrees, Channel 4 2011
Next year’s intake face [tuition] fees of up to £9,000 every year. But life isn’t tough for everyone. For some university bosses the gravy train just keeps on rolling. All in the dash for cash. ibid.
Vice-Chancellor: £250,000. ibid.
British universities are now going global. ibid.
How do Professor Cantor’s [York] students feel about his expenses? ... The house he lives in is rent-free. ibid.
While students pay through the nose for their housing, across the country some university bosses stay in accommodation that you pay for ... Around half have grace-and-favour homes. ibid.
The body that oversees university pensions – the Universities Superannuation Scheme. ibid.
Britain is the second biggest player in the global student market behind the United States. Students from outside the EU currently make up 11% of all higher educational enrolments here; they make up 27% of all postgraduate students. And it’s estimated they contribute £5 billion to the UK economy. One of the top countries sending students to UK universities is India: last year it sent over 38,000 here – up 13% on the previous year. So the market is huge with the UK universities desperate to increase finances. ibid.
At the London School of Economics two-thirds of students are from overseas, many able to pay top rates. Eight years ago, one of those students was the son of Colonel Gaddafi. Saif Gaddafi was awarded a Phd in 2008. A year later the Gaddafi Foundation awarded £1.8 million to the University. ibid.
If we want to stop commercialisation destroying education we have to make a stand. ibid.
Lectures broke into one’s day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays. Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles
If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society ... It is the education which gives a man a clear, conscious view of their own opinions and judgements, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University
‘Ah college years, those were the days. Pure freedom ... leaving home for the first time ... the parties ...’
‘What about the tutorials, the lectures, the large building with all the books called the library?’
‘Is that what those were?’ Gerry blithely replied. E A Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
One of the characteristics of the university is that it is made up of professors who train professors, or professionals training professionals. Education was this no longer directed toward people who were to be educated with a view to become fully developed human beings, but to specialists, in other that they might learn how to train other specialists. This is the danger of Scholasticism, that philosophical tendency which began to be sketched at the end of antiquity, developed in the Middle Ages, and whose presence is still recognizable in philosophy today. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life
A more accurate description of student life in More’s days at Oxford can be gathered from diligent reading of the various statutes, codes and inventories of the period. Among the items which are taken to be normal accoutrements of the student are blankets and a ‘matteresse’ (if not necessarily sheets), proper clothing and a ‘cofer’ for storing them, knives and spoons and possibly even candlesticks. His shared chambers would have included a table, together with stools or chairs, as well as a bowl and pitcher for washing. Many students would have brought with them a musical instrument, the staple means of entertainment during the period, while others would not have left behind the bow and arrows which were the favourite form of sport. The more scholarly or wealthy students might even possess a ‘presse’ for their few and prized books.
It ought to be repeated here that the younger scholars of Oxford, unlike their modern counterparts, were only fourteen or fifteen years of age and that they were entering halls or colleges which, like monasteries and guilds, considered themselves to be formal communities based on the by then traditional idea of the household. This is why elaborate codes of discipline were established to curb individual disruption or general disorder. Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More pp44-45
Dear Senior Tutor,
Yours is a college at which brains are neither here nor there, I’m told ...
Places are tight, I day say, (many being snapped up at birth by Etonians and such) but I’m prepared to pay ‘over the top’ to achieve equality of opportunity. That’s the Tory way. We voted for Mrs Thatcher so that those of us who had indulged in prudent house-keeping down the years could give their youngsters a flying start ... Henry Root, The Henry Root Letters, to Senior Tutor of Magdalene College Cambridge 29th July 1979
When the [McCarthy] subpoenas were issued, nobody knew how MIT would handle the matter. Other universities had responded with immediate firings and suspensions. ‘McCarthyism was a big threat to these schools,’ Zipporah Levinson, Norman Levinson’s widow, recalled ... The threat was that research money would dry up. Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind
Thanks to MIT’s support and the compromise they struck, Levinson and the others kept their jobs. But the whole dispiriting affair, which had been receded by months of harassment and threats, left deep scars on everyone involved. ibid.