Derek Bok Quotes

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Derek Bok

Profession : Lawyer

Birth : March 22, 1930

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance

Derek Bok

For some students, especially in the sciences, the knowledge gained in college may be directly relevant to graduate study. For almost all students, a liberal arts education works in subtle ways to create a web of knowledge that will illumine problems and enlighten judgment on innumerable occasions in later life.

Derek Bok

Economists who have studied the relationship between education and economic growth confirm what common sense suggests: The number of college degrees is not nearly as important as how well students develop cognitive skills, such as critical thinking and problem-solving ability.

Derek Bok

The most obvious purpose of college education is to help students acquire information and knowledge by acquainting them with facts, theories, generalizations, principles, and the like. This purpose scarcely requires justification.

Derek Bok

Doctoral training is devoted almost entirely to learning to do research, even though most Ph.Ds who enter academic life spend far more time teaching than they do conducting experiments or writing books.

Derek Bok

The oldest of the arts and the youngest of the professions.

Derek Bok

I won't say there aren't any Harvard graduates who have never asserted a superior attitude. But they have done so to our great embarrassment and in no way represent the Harvard I know.

Derek Bok

Early admission programs tend to advantage the advantaged.

Derek Bok

I think it's sort of an outrage that companies should have to hire firms to teach the college graduates they employ how to write.

Derek Bok

I suspect that no community will become humane and caring by restricting what its members can say.

Derek Bok

I don't think the alternative to Yale is jail by any means. On the other hand, there is a mass of research that does show that there are real advantages to your subsequent career in going to selective institutions.

Derek Bok

I think the minority students that we admit to Harvard are every bit as meritorious as the white students that we admit.

Derek Bok

What college is all about is some kind of 4-year game about who is going to end up with the highest grades. And I don't mean to say that academic achievement isn't important. But it is, after all, a means to an end.

Derek Bok

I think any self-respecting educational institution ought to judge its policies by its best estimate of what their long-term consequences for their students and for the society will be.

Derek Bok

The first country to adopt happiness as an official goal of public policy is the tiny little country of Bhutan in Asia near China and India.

Derek Bok

Greater inequality in Europe has made people less happy.

Derek Bok

I think one thing that does cause unhappiness is protracted anxiety and worry.

Derek Bok

Education, and I regret to say this as an educator, but there's no indication that education has a direct effect on happiness.

Derek Bok

Once you start worrying about a national football championship, then you begin to worry about getting the quality of athlete, and the numbers needed, to win a national championship. And that worry leads to pressure to compromise academic standards to admit those athletes.

Derek Bok

Good teaching is creating really interesting generalizations out of war stories.

Derek Bok