Serendipity, browsing, screwing around: one of the most fruitful methodologies I know! I’ve always wanted to write a grant proposal with this description in the “methodology” section: “I will go the library and play with the books.”
Hear, hear.
Related post: “Collect Everything.”
The intellectual world, which believes itself so profoundly liberated from conformity and convention, has always seemed to me as inhabited by profound conformities, that acted upon me as repulsive forces.
—Pierre Bourdieu
The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philsophy are not reflections of the real word but artifacts of scholarship.
—Edward O. Wilson, Consilience
When I told my parents I was an American studies major, they were like, “That’s fantastic! Did you read Mark Twain?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“What did you read?”
“Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Michel Foucault.”
“They don’t sound American!”
“They’re not.”
Being willing to sit in a boring classroom for 12 years, and then sign up for four more years and then sign up for three or more years after that – well, that’s a pretty good measure of your willingness to essentially do what you’re told.
—Samuel Bowles
(Via.)
UPDATE: Seth Godin argues that it’s easier to teach compliance than initiative.
At the end of a long and rather arduous period of conditioning, the fledging PhD today no longer enjoys the bargaining power that mere possession of the degree once betokened, and as competition becomes keener, the matter of placement grows more critical.
—Logan Wilson, The Academic Man, 1942
From Write to the Top!: How to Become a Prolific Academic:
If only, right?
Before we parted company that day, I shared an insight with the doctoral student. I told him that if he were to learn every unwritten rule in the academic culture where he was presently studying, and if he followed every one of those rules to perfection, he would have a perfectly mediocre career. His life would become an experience of quiet desperation, filled with psychic entropy. This is the case in the life of many professionals. I told this young student that establishing a notable career requires that we break the rules. At some point, we have to know, accept, and express who we really are, not be content with being what others what us to be.
—Robert E. Quinn
My idea of a writer: someone interested in “everything.” I’d always had interests of many kinds, so it was natural for me to conceive of the vocation of a writer in this way. And reasonable to suppose that such fervency would find more scope in a great metropolis than in any variant of provincial life, including the excellent universities I had attended. The only surprise was that there weren’t more people like me.
—Susan Sontag
Categories: academe · quotes · writing
Tagged: Susan Sontag
