Top 46 Quotes by Derek Bok

What we are doing in educating students is trying to prepare them to live more fulfilling lives for the decades after they graduate. And trying to provide a better, richer, fairer, more decent society for the generations after.

Teaching methods are often inadequate for the goals faculties are trying to achieve. Important courses such as expository writing and foreign languages are frequently taught by untrained graduate students and underpaid adjunct teachers.

I think it's very important to emphasize that there are many, many different educational institutions in what we call higher education, and they educate an enormous diversity of students. I think all of those institutions have to define particular roles for themselves; they can't do everything at once.

There are no tests similar to SATs to tell us how much undergraduates know. State legislators, who appropriate billions of dollars each year to higher education, are naturally interested in finding out what they are getting for their money.

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.