Professors Quotes

I will not descend among professors and capitalists.
~ Walt Whitman

I am not a teacher in my heart," she said. "I am a doer, and all these little shitheads in front of me are do-nothings. There is racism in the world and they acknowledge it, but they sit in class listening to bullshit professors. Give me a bricklayer with a racist attitude. It is just more honest. ~ Allan Dare Pearce

The light was crude. It made Artaud's eyes shrink into darkness, as they are deep-set. This brought into relief the intensity of his gestures. He looked tormented. His hair, rather long, fell at times over his forehead. He has the actor's nimbleness and quickness of gestures. His face is lean, as if ravaged by fevers. His eyes do not seem to see the people. They are the eyes of a visionary. His hands are long, long-fingered.
Beside him Allendy looks earthy, heavy, gray. He sits at the desk, massive, brooding. Artaud steps out on the platform, and begins to talk about " The Theatre and the Plague."
He asked me to sit in the front row. It seems to me that all he is asking for is intensity, a more heightened form of feeling and living. Is he trying to remind us that it was during the Plague that so many marvelous works of art and theater came to be, because, whipped by the fear of death, man seeks immortality, or to escape, or to surpass himself? But then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying by plague. No one quite knew when it began. To illustrate his conference, he was acting out an agony. "La Peste" in French is so much more terrible than "The Plague" in English. But no word could describe what Artaud acted out on the platform of the Sorbonne. He forgot about his conference, the theatre, his ideas, Dr. Allendy sitting there, the public, the young students, his wife, professors, and directors.
His face was ~ Anais Nin

(Heinrich von) Kleist would not be a Prussian if his first thought would not have been orderlinessand he would not be a German if he had not placed all his hopes of developing this inner orderliness into education. Education is the secret of life for him as for every German: studying, learning a lot from books, sitting in lectures, keeping notebooks, listening intently to professors ... ~ Stefan Zweig

I need to do something about college, but I'm not sure what."

"Where have you decided to apply?"

"Nowhere yet. Any time I think about the schools I've visited, I feel overwhelmed. The campuses are so big that I know I'll get lost. I dread making new friends. And the professors acted too busy to deal with someone like me. My parents will be wasting a huge amount of money."

"Your fears are no different than most high school seniors." He studied me thoughtfully. "Must you go to college?"

I opened my mouth to say Of course, I must - and then shut it again. The concept didn't bother me nearly as much as it should have. Skipping college would be crazy. Right? It was hard enough for a disabled person to find a job, but being disabled with no degree would make it hopeless. "I don't have a choice."

"Perhaps you have more choices than you realize. ~ Elizabeth Langston

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

We had two grand antique professors who had been teaching at Lombard since before I was born. ~ Carl Sandburg

Critics of American colleges typically attribute the failings of undergraduate education to a tendency on the part of professors to neglect their teaching to concentrate on research. In fact, the evidence does not support this thesis, except perhaps in major research universities. ~ Derek Bok

Anyone can squash a bug but all professors of this world couldn't build one. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Let us recall the well-known statement of a university professor in the Republic of the Massagetes: 'Not the faculty but His Excellency the General can properly determine the sum of two and two.' ~ Hermann Hesse

I learned that female professors and departmental secretaries are the natural enemies of the academic world, as I was privileged to overhear discussions of my sexual orientation and probable childhood traumas from ten to ten-thirty each morning through the paper-thin walls of the break room located adjacent to my office. By these means I learned that although I was in desperate need of a girdle, I was better off than one of the other female professors, who would never lose all that baby weight by working all of the time. As ~ Hope Jahren

I was editing Canadian Literature. I didn't want to let Canadian Literature go, so they reached a nice compromise by which I received half a professor's salary. ~ George Woodcock

How I understand the philosopher - as a terrible explosive, endangering everthing ... my concept of the philosopher is worlds removed from any concept that would include even a Kant, not to speak of academic "ruminants" and other professors of philosophy ... ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Much of the Constitution is remarkably simple and straightforward - certainly as compared to the convoluted reasoning of judges and law professors discussing what is called 'Constitutional law,' much of which has no basis in that document ... The real question [for judicial nominees] is whether that nominee will follow the law or succumb to the lure of 'a living constitution,' 'evolving standards' and other lofty words meaning judicial power to reshape the law to suit their own personal preferences. ~ Thomas Sowell

Political scientists and professors are the new clergy; the clergy of oppression. ~ A.E. Samaan

Brand names are well known to business school professors, but only one professor is a brand name herself. Call her Professor Oprah. ~ Bill Dedman

It is because the critics are not detached that they do not see this detachment; it is because they are not looking at things in a dry light that they cannot see the difference between black and white. It is because they are in a particular mood of reaction and revolt that they have a motive for making out that all the white is dirty grey and the black not so black as it is painted. I do not say there are not human excuses for their revolt; I do not say it is not in some ways sympathetic; what I say is that it is not in any way scientific. An iconoclast may be indignant; an iconoclast may be justly indignant; but an iconoclast is not impartial. And it is stark hypocrisy to pretend that nine-tenths of the higher critics and scientific evolutionists and professors of comparative religion are in the least impartial. Why should they be impartial, what is being impartial, when the whole world is at war about whether one thing is a devouring superstition or a divine hope? ~ G.K. Chesterton

He has trifled with the sacred memory of my husband," thought the Professor's widow. "On my life and honor, I will make him pay for it. ~ Wilkie Collins

Politics is not a science, as the professors are apt to suppose. It is an art. ~ Otto Von Bismarck

In Leipzig [in the 14th century], the university found it necessary to promulgate a rule against throwing stones at the professors. As late as 1495, a German statute explicitly forbade anyone associated with the university from drenching freshmen with urine. ~ Leonard Mlodinow

I spent a year in Professor Baker's famous class at Harvard. There, too, I learned some things that were useful to me-particularly what not to do. Not to take ten lines, for instance, to say something that can be said in one line. ~ Eugene O'Neill

Any questions I had about whether a redneck from Oklahoma could become a Brown Classical Philosophy professor ended when I met Tim [Blake Nelson]. ~ Edward Norton

I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn't going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I've ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn't want to do whatever he did. ~ J. Cole

Two more women sat, ready to judge her. She thought of all the times she'd imagined her audition for Juilliard. The people in front of her were not Juilliard professors, but ~ Diane Chamberlain

Also, I had read a book called She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, written by a professor who had gone through transgender surgery, but it took this person well into his thirties to come to terms with the absolute necessity of having to do it. ~ Mercedes Ruehl

I then moved to the University of Western Ontario where I was made a full professor in 1985. ~ J. Philippe Rushton

The Indian diaspora is not a capital-accumulating diaspora. The Indian diaspora is doctors, lawyers, professors. Or newspaper sellers. They are basically trade- or profession-oriented, and so they're not major investors in their home country. ~ Jairam Ramesh

Many, perhaps most, very learned people prefer the company of their books to sitting in a crowd listening to history and art being mangled; furthermore, it is unlikely that the venerable scholars will stand up afterward to declare, "This lecture was a load of crap." The more profound a professor's distaste with the proceedings, the more likely he is to melt away at the end of the talk. ~ Camille Paglia

But to do it professionally is a quantum leap difference and my father had to be persuaded by these kind of Ivy League professors that I should go to the Yale Drama School, another one of the stories in there. ~ Robert Klein

Every professor secretly thinks that what the world needs is a good, solid lecture
from him, of course. ~ Gregory Benford

The great thing about working out at a gym is that if you put in effort, you get very obvious results. The same should be true of college. A professor's job is to teach students how to see their minds growing in the same way they can see their muscles grow when they look in a mirror. ~ Randy Pausch

I am reminded of the professor who, in his declining hours, was asked by his devoted pupils for his final counsel. He replied, 'Verify your quotations. ~ Winston Churchill

In marked contrast to the University of Wisconsin, Biochemistry was hardly visible at Stanford in 1945, consisting of only two professors in the chemistry department. ~ Paul D. Boyer

Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight. ~ Camille Paglia

College professors used to be badly paid and worth it. Colleges used to be modest institutions; they should go back to being modest institutions. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Japanese universities have a chair system that is a fixed hierarchy. This has its merits when trying to work as a laboratory on one theme. But if you want to do original work you must start young, and young people are limited by the chair system. Even if students cannot become assistant professors at an early age they should be encouraged to do original work.
... Industry is more likely to put its research effort into its daily business. It is very difficult for it to become involved in pure chemistry. There is a need to encourage long-range research, even if we don't know its goal and if its application is unknown. ~ Kenichi Fukui

The professor's motive was in the grand scheme of things terribly petty " Greenwood said. ""Pilate's Cross" is inspired by the questions this terrible crime created but as a work of fiction it is set in a different place and time and has a more complex motive for the murders. ~ J. Alexander Greenwood

If you would learn a thing, straightway declare yourself a professor of it! ~ John Barth

What a gulf between impression and expression! That's our ironic fate - to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse - touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash. ~ Aldous Huxley

I would beg the wise and learned fathers (of the church) to consider with all diligence the difference which exists between matters of mere opinion and matters of demonstration ... [I]t is not in the power of professors of the demonstrative sciences to alter their opinions at will, so as to be now of one way of thinking and now of another ... [D]emonstrated conclusions about things in nature of the heavens, do not admit of being altered with the same ease as opinions to what is permissible or not, under a contract, mortgage, or bill of exchange. ~ Galileo Galilei

But when a system of religion is made to grow out of a supposed system of creation that is not true, and to unite itself therewith in a manner almost inseparable therefrom, the case assumes an entirely different ground. It is then that errors, not morally bad, become fraught with the same mischiefs as if they were. It is then that the truth, though otherwise indifferent itself, becomes an essential, by becoming the criterion that either confirms by corresponding evidence, or denies by contradictory evidence, the reality of the religion itself. In this view of the case it is the moral duty of man to obtain every possible evidence that the structure of the heavens, or any other part of creation affords, with respect to systems of religion. But this, the supporters or partizans of the christian system, as if dreading the result, incessantly opposed, and not only rejected the sciences, but persecuted the professors. ~ Thomas Paine

Yet another video has emerged of MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber calling Americans 'stupid,' and bragging about how the Affordable Care Act's drafters had to deceive the public in order to pass the law. ~ Alexander Viets Griswold

The Scripture teaches that popularity with the world means death. Satan's most effective tool is conformity and compromise. He is aware that one man standing in the midst of a pagan people
can move more people in the direction of God than thousands of insipid professors of religion. ~ Billy Graham

From the day we touched these stolen shores, he'd explain to anyone who'd listen, they infected our minds. They deployed their phrenologists, their backward Darwinists, and forged a false Knowledge to keep us down. But against this demonology, there were those who battled back. Universities scorned them. Compromised professors scoffed at their names. So they published themselves and hawked their Knowledge at street fairs, churches, and bazaars.
For their efforts, they were forgotten. Their great works languished out of print, while those they sought to save grew fat on integration and amnesia. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

There are only two things in which the false professors of all religions have agreed
to persecute all other sects and to plunder their own. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

The mind reels at the multiplication of books intended to justify the author's promotion from assistant to associate professor. ~ C. Northcote Parkinson

Ungodly persons and mere professors never look upon religion as a joyful thing; to them it is service, duty, or necessity, but never pleasure or delight. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I wanted to be a political science professor and go to school in Boston. I never wanted to be a big, famous movie star and TV star. It kind of found me. ~ Eliza Dushku

Historically, professors have defended tenure as a way to protect their individualistic thought. But tenure can also be used as a club to wield against the powerless. ~ Ben Shapiro

A well regulated commerce is not, like law, physic, or divinity, to be overstocked with hands; but, on the contrary, flourishes by multitudes, and gives employment to all its professors. ~ Joseph Addison

Someone's always calling for my resignation. It's nothing new. It's something that's been part of my tenure at Exodus over the last decade plus. So he can add his voice to the chorus of others whether it's gay activists or now a New Testament professor. ~ Alan Chambers

Some conservatives have expressed outrage that the views of professors are at odds with the views of students, as if ideas were entitled to be represented in proportion to their popularity and students were entitled to professors who share their political or social values. One of the more important functions of college that it exposes young people to ideas and arguments they have not encountered at home is redefined as a problem. ~ Ellen Willis

And then there is Pythagoras. The legend is that the founder of theoretical mathematics was so outraged when one of his students, the haplessly gifted Hippasus, discovered irrational numbers21 that he sent the poor fellow out on a raft to drown, initiating a venerable tradition of professors mistreating their graduate students. ~ Rebecca Goldstein

Seminary also introduced me to the historical study of Jesus and Christian origins. I learned from my professors and the readings they assigned that Jesus almost certainly was not born of a virgin, did not think of himself as the Son of God, and did not see his purpose as dying for the sins of the world.. I also found the claim that Jesus and Christianity were the only way of salvation to be troublesome. ~ Marcus Borg

What is especially ironic about these professors' rhetoric of "otherness" and "queerness" is that they are, in fact, by any real-world measure, extremely conservative, lockstep, institutional, careerist creatures. Their sense of identification with their universities, their departments, and their fields of "study", not to mention the obvious way they size one another up by their titles, academic affiliation, and publications, is stifling. So are their endless pious references to Marx, Foucault, and Derrida, which bring to mind the obligatory nods to the Great Leader at some Communist Party congress. ~ Bruce Bawer

Pope Benedict XVI's resignation is big on buzz but is not the stunning surprise claimed by many pundits. It is rather a further example of the German theology professor's style that informed his years as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, his term as pope, and the formation of his legacy to the church. ~ Eugene Kennedy

As professor of global peace studies at the International Islamic University of Malaysia I am committed to the ending of war also through criminalization of war, an approach that has not been sufficiently used in spite of the UN Charter outlawing war - with too many loopholes used buy aggressive countries. ~ Johan Galtung

Professor Snape was forcing them to research antidotes. They took this one seriously, as he had hinted that he might be poisoning one of them before Christmas to see if their antidote worked. ~ J.K. Rowling

A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy. ~ Camille Paglia

I didn't do too well until my second year, when I realized that there were no right or wrong answers and that my professors were interested only in how well I could develop an argument. ~ Joe Jamail

There is a form of poetic and esthetic and moral genius necessary to make philosophical issues truly incandesce for students, and even though I indeed had some world-class professors myself when I went through the curriculum, I rarely saw such gnosic or concretist/poetic passion among them. I am not speaking of broad histrionics or melodramatic delivery, but rather a moral investment of concern, of loving delight and pathos in exposing one's consciousness to the full horrific and magnificent implications of the materials. ~ Kenny Smith

He remembered the Professor's advice to his eager employees during his first year: With us, feelings are described through images, and in the world of television, there are only seven feelings: well-being, Schadenfreude, sentimentality, shock, outrage, disgust, and anger. Nothing else. ~ Erik Valeur

One thing I point out is, a lot of people tooting the horn of amateurism, actually, these people were professionals. Some are professors who are employed full time. Others are marketers or business consultants. ~ Astra Taylor

I also liked it when professors assigned us stories that they love. In general, I liked workshops more when they were more than just a workshop, when the professor took the time to actually guide us as young writers and teach us things it took them a long time to figure out on their own. I could probably write ten pages on this question. ~ Mary J. Miller

If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it. ~ Noam Chomsky

With sixty professors there are roughly eighteen hundred pairs of professors. Out of that many pairs it was not surprising that there were some whose members did not like one another. ~ Stanislaw Ulam

The company I invested in is probably a leader in that area. They're a company called Second Spectrum, which happens to be based in LA but was started by two USC computer-science professors. It's filled with guys who love sports, who played sports, but really look like programmers. ~ Steve Ballmer

A student's wisdom is more valuable than a professor's knowledge. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Take the teacher not the course. Find out who the great professors are - the great teachers - and take their courses because a subject that you may not think you're interested in may turn out to be infinitely fascinating because of the way it's taught. ~ David McCullough

In our hunger for guidance, we were ordinary. The American Freshman Survey, which has followed students since 1966, proves the point. One prompt in the questionnaire asks entering freshmen about "objectives considered to be essential or very important." In 1967, 86 percent of respondents checked "developing a meaningful philosophy of life," more than double the number who said "being very well off financially." Naturally, students looked to professors for moral and worldly understanding. Since then, though, finding meaning and making money have traded places. The first has plummeted to 45 percent; the second has soared to 82 percent. ~ Anonymous

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling conventions. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.
But this strategy alone couldn't provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerant. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names. ~ Barack Obama

His students were hardly in a position to tell him when he was getting windy, and he had recently noticed, as most professors did after a while, that his lectures mysteriously seemed to be getting longer with time. ~ Aaron Elkins

If you don't have to pay for everything you're providing, why in the world should you cut the cost of it, when it's gonna be covered? That's what's happened to the health care system. Why cut costs when somebody's gonna subsidize whatever you charge. But there's another reason why tuitions are never gonna come down on major American universities, and that's because they are the training ground of American liberalism and radicalism. And they have to make jobs there attractive to the professors and the teachers who are gonna indoctrinate these young skulls full of mush. ~ Rush Limbaugh

Theology is not a private subject for theologians only. Nor is it a private subject for professors. Fortunately, there have always been pastors who have understood more about theology than most professors. Nor is theology a private subject of study for pastors. Fortunately, there have repeatedly been congregation members, and often whole congregations, who have pursued theology energetically while their pastors were theological infants or barbarians. Theology is a matter for the Church. ~ Karl Barth

All my brothers, my brothers-in-law, they're always telling me what a good-hearted guy I am. You don't get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you get to be a real professor of pain. ~ Paddy Chayefsky

University of Chicago is a Baptist school, where atheist professors teach Jewish students about St. Thomas Aquinas. ~ Martin Gardner

A Student is the most important person ever in this school ... in person, on the telephone, or by mail.
A Student is not dependent on us ... we are dependent on the Student.
A Student is not an interruption of our work..the Studenti s the purpose of it. We are not doing a favor by serving the Student ... the Student is doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.
A Student is a person who brings us his or her desire to learn. It is our job to handle each Student in a manner which is beneficial to the Student and ourselves. ~ William W. Purkey

Schopenhauer's Will-to-live, commendable as it may seem as a hypothesis, is too overwrought in the proving to be anything more than another intellectual labyrinth for specialists in perplexity. Comparatively, Zapffe's principles are non-technical and could never arouse the passion of professors ~ Thomas Ligotti

That's what happens when you study men: you find mare's nests. I happen to believe that you can't study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing. Because you study them, you want to make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music, which is balderdash. You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living and not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors. ~ C.S. Lewis

Science [is] that wonderfully convenient personification of the opinions, at a certain date, of Professors X, Y, and Z ... ~ Aldous Huxley

If America's universities are indeed poor value for money, why might that be? The main reason is that the market for higher education, like that for health care, does not work well. The government rewards universities for research, so that is what professors concentrate on. Students are looking for a degree from an institution that will impress employers; employers are interested primarily in the selectivity of the institution a candidate has attended. Since the value of a degree from a selective institution depends on its scarcity, good universities have little incentive to produce more graduates. ~ Anonymous

TGIF," I said aloud even though it was only Thursday. But I was alone in my apartment as far as I knew. I deliberately avoid making whimsical incorrect statements in public. You would be surprised at how many people get irritated if you say "TGIF" on the wrong day. By "people" I mean "English professors." To most English professors it would be inconceivable to say, "Thank God it's Friday" on a Thursday. I don't know if that's because they are strict adherents to the rules of language or if they are mentally ill. ~ Gary Reilly

As I ate she began the first of what we later called "my lessons in living." She said that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and even more intelligent than college professors. She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations. ~ Maya Angelou

You cannot write an accurate history of The Holocaust without accounting for the Harvard students and professors that help make the science an acceptable world-wide movement. ~ A.E. Samaan

Those politicians, professors and union bosses who curse big business are fighting for a lower standard of living. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

I come from a family where my father is a filmmaker and professor of film. ~ Derek Magyar

Create sacred spaces in the workplace as well. Classrooms, five years ago, professors would say, I don't want be a nanny to my students. They can do whatever they want. Now professors are saying, put away that laptop, because studies show that it not only takes away the attention of the person who's on the laptop from the class, but everyone around them. There's like a circle around that person that's distracted and not paying attention. ~ Judy Woodruff

One of the many drawbacks of this "I teach what I am" approach is that it stifles classroom discussion. Any disagreement with the professor's expertise comes off as an ad hominem attack. ~ Maureen Corrigan

The most frequent complaint I hear from college students is that professors inject their leftist political comments into their courses even when they have nothing to do with the subject. ~ Phyllis Schlafly

The university is in danger of losing its monopoly, and for good reason. The most visible threat are the new online courses, many of them free, with some of the best professors in their respective fields. ~ Don Tapscott

Q: What literary complexities do you find most interesting? That is, what do you like most to "solve," so to speak, as a novelist?
A: One wishes to create characters who will speak directly to the minds of comparative literature professors and intelligent book reviewers. ~ Gilbert Sorrentino

When our small research group moved from MIT to Dartmouth College years ago, one of the Dartmouth engineering professors watched us in seminars for a while, and then dropped by our offices. "You people are different," he said. "You ask different kinds of questions. You see things I don't see. Somehow you come at the world in a different way. How? Why? ~ Donella H. Meadows

For the purpose of acquiring gain, everything else is pushed aside or thrown overboard, for example, as is philosophy by the professors of philosophy. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Relatively, there are many scientists who believe in God. And in Oxford, where I am the Professor, there are more professors like me, who believe in God, than you think. There are not dozens of them, but they are there, and in Cambridge too, and elsewhere. We are not in a tiny minority. ~ John Lennox

Introduction I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them. Although I was given a dry, leathery corpse to dissect in my first term, that was solely a way to learn about human anatomy. Our textbooks had almost nothing on aging or frailty or dying. How the process unfolds, how people experience the end of their lives, and how it affects those around them seemed beside the point. The way we saw it, and the way our professors saw it, the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise. The one time I remember discussing mortality was during an hour we spent on The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy's classic novella. ~ Atul Gawande

Descartes, the father of modern philosophy ... would never-so he assures us-have been led to construct his philosophy if he had had only one teacher, for then he would have believed what he had been told; but, finding that his professors disagreed with each other, he was forced to conclude that no existing doctrine was certain. ~ Bertrand Russell

Somehow, all the talk about tenure and anthropology had given her visions of a thick-walled, libraried adobe, the kind of place that was covered with kilim rugs and fertility sculptures. The white stucco in front of her looked only slightly more substantial than a roadside weigh station. ~ Mira Jacob

I didn't think students were allowed below the main floor. I knew the kitchens were there, as were most of the servants' quarters; the professors and Mrs. Westcliffe had their own aboveground wing on the other side of the castle. No one had ever specifically told me not to go below stairs, however-probably because a true Iverson girl would never, ever dream of mingling with the help.
I could always say I'd gotten lost. The pillars of the world would hardly collapse. The sky would not shatter. I was barely a hairbreadth away from being the help myself. ~ Shana Abe

Dear Mama,
I hope this letter finds you well. It contains all my love and affection. (It also contains all my questions about how you could ever have loved a man like Professor Miller.)
You asked about where I live. I cannot believe I haven't mentioned it, but I suppose I'm so used to it now I don't think of it. The dorms are small and plain, but as a student I don't need much more. (I cannot afford the dorms. I do not live in them.) The food is dreadful, all heavy meat and sauce. I miss fruit! (I am always hungry; a supper with a strange man was the fullest my stomach has been since I got here.)
As I have mentioned in every letter, my professors are all interesting and I take copious notes during lectures. (If you do not bring up my father, I am certainly not going to offer you information on that louse of a man.) The course work is challenging but I am excelling. (I have to be perfect so they can find no excuse to dock my grades.)
I have delivered Aunt Nani's package to Jacabo. He was so happy to receive it, and I take tea with him once a week. It is a great comfort to speak Melenese with someone. (I live in the hotel where Jacabo works. He saved me when I realized I could not afford room and board at the school. I work long, hard hours in the evenings to earn a tiny hole of a servant's room and whatever scraps of food are left over.)
Please give everyone my love and tell them how much I am learning to bring back to the island as a teacher. (I will ~ Kiersten White