With its underlying principles of free expression and academic freedom — Robert Rubin

"Internalizing the core tenet of Professor Demos’s teaching — weighing risk and analyzing odds and trade-offs — was central to everything I did professionally in the decades ahead in finance and government."

"Looking back, what most prepared me for the life I’ve led was the open exchange of ideas that I experienced in college and law school... I have seen firsthand the way America’s higher-education system strengthens our nation."

"We invest in higher education because there’s a broad public purpose. Our colleges and universities are seen, rightly, as centers of learning, but they are also engines of economic growth... Institutions of higher education spur early-stage research of all kinds, create environments for commercializing that research, provide a base for start-up and technology hubs, and serve as a mentoring incubator for new generations of entrepreneurs and business leaders."

"Higher education helps create the kind of citizenry that is central to a democracy’s ability to function and perhaps even to survive."

"One does not have to agree with the sentiments being expressed by a speaker in order to be troubled by the idea that they would be suppressed because of their content."

"[May] twelfth was a day I had hoped would never come; Bob Rubin was returning to private life. I believed he had been the best and most important Treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton in the early days of our Republic. Bob had also been the first head of the National Economic Council. In both positions he had played a decisive role in our efforts to restore economic growth and spread its benefits to more Americans, to prevent and contain financial crisis abroad, and to modernize the international financial system to deal with a global economy in which more than one trillion dollars crossed national borders every day."