Quotes

This is from John Warner, Carnegie Mellon’s 4th president.  The year was 1961.

“…We haven’t yet found any satisfactory reason for an educational institution to provide an athletic “show” on a commercial scale for a high proportion of the general public.”

Dean Quincy Adams Wagstaff Doesn’t Agree:

GROUCHO (Dean Quincy Adams Wagstaff ): Have we got a stadium?

FACULTY: Yes.

GROUCHO: Have we got a college?

FACULTY: Yes.

GROUCHO: Well, we can’t support both. Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.

—From Horse Feathers, 1932, starring the Marx Brothers

University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins once wrote.

 “It is sad but true that when an institution determines to do something in order to get money it must lose its soul, and it frequently does not get the money. … I do not mean, of course, that universities do not need money and that they should not try to get it. I mean only that they should have an educational policy and then try to finance it, instead of letting financial accidents determine their educational policy.”

From Harvard University’s President Derek Bok’s Report to the Board of Overseers, 1996,

“The commercialization of universities is perhaps the most severe threat facing higher education…Universities appear less and less as charitable institutions seeking truth and serving students, and more and more as a huge commercial operation that differs from corporations only because there are no shareholders and no dividends.”

Max Weber

“Methodology can only bring us reflective understanding of the means which have demonstratedtheir value in practice by raising them to the level of explicit consciousness; it is no more the precondition of fruitful intellectual work than the knowledge of anatomy is the precondition of “correct” walking.”

Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences