“If you don’t take the money, they can’t tell you what to do. That’s the key to the whole thing.”

—Bill Cunningham

—Josh Wimmer

Related post: “An Important Lesson.”

—Richard Mitchell, The Graves of Academe

(Via Michael Leddy.)

“Do you have any books the faculty doesn’t particularly recommend?”

(Via Wesley Hill.)

Oh, and for the record, I’d rather be a fox.

(Via Put This On.)

Previously: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

—T. S. Eliot

(Via.)

The American university is where so-called ‘French theory’ was actually invented, and not in philosophy departments but via comparative literature, other literature departments, sometimes media studies, and various other places. So you couldn’t quite call it philosophy—it got called ‘theory’ and sometimes ‘high theory’. You end up with this construct, based essentially around the reception of Derrida into the Anglophone world through these centres of intellectual power in the US. And this is interesting, but it occupies a certain kind of terrain, a certain space. It requires a certain training.

I’ve always been much more interested in something else: The self-conscious attempt to construct conceptual practices outside of formal settings. That is what Marx did, it’s what Freud did, it’s what Benjamin did; I’d even say it’s what Nietzsche did, because of course he’s on ‘permanent leave’ when he’s writing all these amazing books, when he’s already losing it. Somehow, these guys are all now ‘high theory’, but that’s not where they came from whatsoever. Marx is not a philosopher, Freud is not a philosopher, Benjamin is not a philosopher; I’d even say Nietzsche is not a philosopher. They’re all doing ‘low theory’, and I’m trying to tell stories that fit into that tradition, maybe not at that level, but as a whole other way of thinking about the practice of knowledge in everyday life. This puts on the table the question of the politics of knowledge in a way that can’t be directly asked, or answered, in the space of the university.

Yeah, me too.

—Hal Varian

(Via.)

Related post: Invisible Literature.

—Graduate student at the Quendelton State University School of Graduate Studies

(Via Austin Kleon.)

—Jess Row

—Errol Morris

Two of my three personal recommendations to Syracuse were written by Woody Allen and Gore Vidal. Woody hand wrote in Venice, on Hotel Gritti Palace stationary, ‘Peter Weller is my friend, a fellow actor, writer, director, musician and a credit to his race.’ Gore Vidal was less oblique: Vidal, typing on a an old Remington wrote, ‘I’ve known Weller a long time. He is an extraordinary student … of exactly what I have no idea.’ My third recommendation was written by the ex-Mayor Richard Riordan of Los Angeles.

That’s right, Peter Weller’s in grad school.

—Alan Jacobs

Via Austin Kleon via PhD Comics.

—J. M. Anderson, “An Open Letter to New Professors”

(Via.)

Previously: Parts I, II, III. IV, and V.

—joannaoc

Hear, hear.

Related post: “Collect Everything.”

—Pierre Bourdieu

—Edward O. Wilson, Consilience

“No, I didn’t.”

“What did you read?”

“Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Michel Foucault.”

“They don’t sound American!”

“They’re not.”

—Andrew Breitbart

I’ve had this exact same conversation countless times.

—Samuel Bowles

(Via.)

UPDATE: Seth Godin argues that it’s easier to teach compliance than initiative.

—Logan Wilson, The Academic Man, 1942

—Robert E. Quinn

—Susan Sontag

John Gavin as a small-town college professor in Tammy Tell Me True (1961).

I repeat: If academics in real life dressed anything like academics in the movies, they’d be one of the best-dressed occupational groups in America.

See also Parts I, II, and III.

(Via.)

Such gestures embarrassed me a little, but they also made me feel more confident and capable. I began to think I could exert some pressure on my institution to raise the bar of formality a little by raising it a lot for myself.

In the process, I probably irritated some of my colleagues, a few of whom are aggressively informal on principle: denim, work boots, sandals – anything goes but formality. The situation is not unique to my home institution. Professors (in the humanities, at least) don’t make much money relative to other professionals, so we press our sour grapes into the sweeter wine of smugness: “We are too important to pay attention to such trivial, privileged matters as clothing.”

—Thomas H. Benton, aka William Pannapacker