Derek Bok Quotes
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The University has a moral obligation to provide equal opportunities to women, minority persons and all other groups who work or seek to work at Harvard.
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If we are prepared to invest the necessary time and effort, affirmative action can contribute to Harvard's quality and not detract from it.
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Education, and I regret to say this as an educator, but there's no indication that education has a direct effect on happiness.
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Most high governmental officials who speak of education policy seem to conceive of education in this light - as a way to ensure economic competitiveness and continued economic growth. I strongly disagree with this approach.
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Apart from finding a first job, college graduates seem to adapt more easily than those with only a high school degree as the economy evolves and labor-market needs change.
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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.
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Universities are in a position where they can think very creatively.
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I don't regard the fact that there's a disparity in test scores nearly as importantly as I do the need for diversity, because I know from long experience that test scores, though useful, are a very limited measure of things that matter in choosing students.
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The vast majority of students probably emerge from college with an adequate grasp of no more than a single method of inquiry. Even this capacity may erode over time if it does not relate to experiences and problems that recur in the student's later life.
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Freshly minted Ph.Ds typically teach the way their favorite professors taught.
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Again and again, universities have put a low priority on the very programs and initiatives that are needed most to increase productivity and competitiveness, improve the quality of government, and overcome the problems of illiteracy, miseducation, and unemployment.
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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.
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Colleges do not merely offer preparation for the future; they occupy four years of a student's life, and an institution should do what it can to make these years absorbing and enjoyable.
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Fewer than half of all university professors publish as much as one article per year.
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I suspect that no community will become humane and caring by restricting what its members can say.
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I think the minority students that we admit to Harvard are every bit as meritorious as the white students that we admit.
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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.
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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.
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Early admission programs tend to advantage the advantaged.
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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.