It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.
From Richard Hofstadter
The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination.
A university's essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism - a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.
2 perspectives