Summary

This unique book offers quotations that reflect both historic and current thinking in the field of higher education. These quotations are enjoyable to read, useful to those who speak and write on the subject of higher education, and illustrative of the enduring purposes of the academic enterprise. This book will be of particular value to academic, political, and journalistic practitioners who prepare speeches, position papers, or news backgrounders for both professional and lay audiences, as well as for scholars seeking citations to materials that are otherwise difficult to locate. More than 1,600 quotations from over 650 authors are arranged both chronologically and by subject. This arrangement offers readers the opportunity to trace how thinking has changed, or how it has remained the same, during the 2000-year period covered in this book. The collection includes both statements that support higher education as well as those that criticize it.

Many of the quotations in this book were developed from original sources, which are cited in detail for verification and further reading. The represented authors range from academic leaders to social critics, U.S. presidents to Russian revolutionaries, Roman poets to student radicals, John Donne to Fats Domino. All of the authors are identified by professional positions, years of birth, and, where applicable, year of death.