When policy makers talk about higher education, from the president all the way down, they talk exclusively in terms of math and science. Journalists and pundits—some of whom were humanities majors and none of whom are nurses or engineers—never tire of lecturing the young about the necessity of thinking prudently when choosing a course of study, the naïveté of wanting to learn things just because you’re curious about them.
~ William Deresiewicz
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We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place.
~ William Deresiewicz
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Life is more than a job; jobs are more than a paycheck; and a country is more than its wealth.
~ William Deresiewicz
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Learning for its own sake means exactly what it says: learning is the only reason that you’re doing it, because learning is what matters.
~ William Deresiewicz
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It is not the job of truth to make us feel good. It is the job of truth to be true, and it is our job to deal with it.
~ William Deresiewicz
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That’s how envy works: the better things are, the worse they are, because they don’t belong to you.
~ William Deresiewicz
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We inherited a strong and flourishing country, and instead of making the investments – that is, the sacrifices – to maintain it, we chose to suck it dry and stick our children with the bill. If you want to see who is to blame for student debt, just look in the mirror. And if parents find themselves supporting kids beyond their college years, that is only, in the aggregate, a form of compensatory justice: the intergenerational transfer of wealth that should have been effected through taxation.
~ William Deresiewicz
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