"We need some citizens committed to exploring and producing knowledge, as well as consuming it, and the outcomes cannot be measured solely in economic terms (nor is the Ph.D. the only path to that end, but it is certainly an important one)."
"...After the more prosperous era of the mid-1990s through around 2008, we seem to have forgotten the truly dreadful market of the 1970s, the awful job market of most of the 1980s, some of the occasional downturns of the 1990s, and the fact that even the best of times has never offered the number of tenure-track jobs equal to the number of Ph.D.’s."
"A friend who did a lot of consulting work when tenure-track jobs were not readily forthcoming once told me that having a Ph.D. means two things: You know a lot about a little, and you know better than most people how to look things up—particularly at a time when there is so much cheap, unreliable, useless information out there."
"My great-grandmother would talk about her uncles who served in the Maine Regiment during the Civil War, my great-grandfather’s work helping to build the Canadian railroad and Halifax harbour, the first time she used a flush toilet, talked on the phone (she still had a party line), road in automobile, and so forth. It made me appreciate how much technology transformed the world within a century."
"The past contains many answers, but until we ask the right questions their meaning eludes us."