Campus Quotes

“I'd decided the campus was just a place to hide. There were some campus freaks who stayed on forever. The whole college scene was soft. They never told you what to expect out there in the real world. They just crammed you with theory and never told you how hard the pavements were. A college education could destroy an individual for life. Books could make you soft. When you put them down, and really went out there, then you needed to know what they never told you.”
― Charles Bukowski , Ham on Rye

“The grass is full of ghosts tonight.' 'The whole campus is alive with them.' They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rustling trees. 'You know,' whispered Tom, 'what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“I don't think we have ever had real democracy in this country. Anyone who studies adoption of the constitution will understand quite clearly that; democracy - as we understand that on today; was the last thing the founding fathers had in mind when they wrote the constitution ....it was: to establish strong central authority responding the elitist interests in United States. That's private property. And those men who wrote the constitution were representatives of the elites. They were the lawyers, bankers, merchants, the land owners, slave owners and so forth. And they write the constitution for their own private interest$. That is how government has served ever since. And that is why we have so little democracy in United States.”
― Philip Agee, CIA Off Campus: Building the Movement Against Agency Recruitment and Research

“One aspiration and thousand aspirants fighting to make their place.”
― Parul Wadhwa, The Masquerade

“I decided that I was going to fewer student parties after I ripped part of the sleeve out of my black dress helping a freshman climb a fence. By the end of the first semester, what I wanted to do most in the world was invite a few of my husband’s students over for tea and drop them down the well.”
― Shirley Jackson, Raising Demons

“The food in the hostel mess is worst of a kind. The grief in my words reach easily to those who have "been there and done that" Chapatti in the meal is either so uncooked or overly cooked and you can only expect dal in the ocean of water when you are ready to swim.”
― Parul Wadhwa, The Masquerade

“I am a palette of emotions; I remember how I have cov-eted to be free from the school rules. I look around to see people casually dressed up and walking with an aim maybe to make a better career or just add fame of DU degree like me. The campus is buzzing with freshman and activity. I just hope, these corridors, hallways, and passages don’t see me trip-ping and falling any day. I feel more comfortable standing in between the crowd of people moving. Like nobody is paying any heed. You can be yourself without feeling awkward about anything.”
― Parul Wadhwa, The Masquerade

“Cut off's are like real sadist as they watch some folks happy and disappoint the majority. People dream of a life at Delhi University. Delhiites know there is something special about the brand name and life at the campus. Rest as they say is history and it speaks volumes.”
― Parul Wadhwa, The Masquerade

“College life is different, entirely different like you don't have to get ready and wear that red and crisp blue school uniform and look alike every day. Free to define ourselves with statement attire. Good thing.”
― Parul Wadhwa, The Masquerade

“Some questions are more complicated than their answers could be.”
― Parul Wadhwa, The Masquerade

“American campuses. Like Disneyland, they are an ideal micro-city, the artificial ideal type of an intellectual biosphere. Like any realization of an ideal, they end up secreting a fierce coercion ('political correctness') and an internal intoxication, with its poisons and endorphins.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“Bad social science might result from systematic bias, but to embrace blame analysis as a way of evaluating theory or to transform sociology into advocacy for the oppressed is to do something else entirely.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“College towns [are] all the same in that way; same burger, different wrapper.”
― Sheri Webber, Devil Went Down: And Hell Came Running

“USA schools know that computer electromagnetic interference (EMI) emissions, WiFi and campus cell towers are radiation poisoning the children and the government is determined to keep on doing it.”
― Steven Magee, Health Forensics

“The campus spreads around him like the verdant pleasure garden of an ancient king. He is enraptured by the enormous trees that lift branches like cathedral roofs overhead, shoot roots like polished ballroom floors underfoot. In the hot afternoons he leaves the crowded rooms to study under the protection of these spreading giants.”
― Nayomi Munaweera, Island of a Thousand Mirrors

“He is quick witted, yes! Astute big time & level headed in opinion. It is my firsthand judgment of a man.”
― Parul Wadhwa

“Having studied university campus cell phone radiation, I now understand why I have found university professors to be a strange group of characters.”
― Steven Magee

“The universities are really going to have to clean up their serious environmental radiation problems before I will advise anyone to enroll.”
― Steven Magee

“Las palabras que generan estrés o miedo a los miembros de algunos grupos a menudo se consideran ahora como una forma de violencia.
Las palabras no son violencia. Tratarlas como tal es una decisión interpretativa, y esa elección aumenta el dolor y el sufrimiento mientras que impide otras respuestas más eficaces, como la respuesta estoica (cultivas la no reactividad) y la respuesta antifrágil.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Campus victimhood culture is so conducive to accusations on behalf of victim groups that we should not be surprised if many turn out to be false.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Interpreting a campus lecture as violence is a choice, and it is a choice that increases your pain with respect to the lecture while reducing your options for how to respond.”
― Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Sociology and social justice each have potential only when operating within their limits. The promise that a science of social life could aid social justice efforts was reasonable, but when social justice becomes an ideology unmoored from empirical reality, it needs no science.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Victimhood culture makes it hard to avoid wrongdoing. If you have any kind of privilege, the social world is full of peril; you always risk giving offense. Engage in small talk and you might be guilty of a microaggression. Cook a new dish or adopt a new hairstyle and you might be guilty of cultural appropiation. Teach about something unpleasant and you might be guilty of triggering someone. Express your religions or political beliefs and you might be guilty of violence. Whatever you do, you must do it in a way that is supportive of victims and reproachful of their oppressors.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“... campus administrators were modeling distorted thinking. Two categories of First Amendment cases on campus encourage this kind of thinking quite directly: overreaction and overregulation.”
― Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“In practice, the bar has been lowered; many universities use the concept of harassment to justify punishing one-time utterances that could be construed as offensive but don't really look anything like harassment”
― Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“When the campus allows just a single narrative, the open-minded students do not seem so open-minded anymore. They have already made their decisions on who is oppressed and who is not. It's no surprise that when you've decided that Jewish students are privileged white kids, you've decided that antisemitism is impossible - even as you demonstrate it yourself.”
― Eliana Kohn, Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech, and BDS

“Campus

Shirt sleeves half out of the jeans,
Eyes grounding the green while looking
All around for Christmas nights.

Blue sounds of church bells ringing
On morning streets and alleys
Are rewritten in archways beneath.

The campus is clear of recitation,
And the steps lead to none other than doors
That keep opening to New Year’s hope.”
― Laura Chouette