Quotes by Derek Bok

About Derek Bok:

Derek Curtis Bok is an American lawyer and educator and the former president of Harvard University. He is the son of Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice Curtis Bok and Margaret Plummer Bok; the grandson of Ladies' Home Journal editor Edward W. Bok and Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist, founder of the Curtis Institute of Music; the cousin of prominent Maine folklorist Gordon Bok; and the great-grandson of Cyrus H. K. Curtis, founder of the Curtis Publishing Company, publisher of national magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

Derek Bok

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 l...

Derek Bok

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.

Derek Bok

There is far too much law for those who can afford it and far too little for those who cannot.

Derek Bok

The oldest of the arts and the youngest of the professions.

Derek Bok

I don't think the alternative to Yale is jail by any means. On the other hand, there is a mass of research that does show that there are real advantages to your subsequent career in going to selective institutions.

Derek Bok

What college is all about is some kind of 4-year game about who is going to end up with the highest grades. And I don't mean to say that academic achievement isn't important. But it is, after all, a means to an end.

Derek Bok

I think one thing that does cause unhappiness is protracted anxiety and worry.

Derek Bok

Colleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should. Many students graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers... reason clearly or perform competently in...

Derek Bok

Greater inequality in Europe has made people less happy.

Derek Bok

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.

Derek Bok

Efforts to develop critical thinking falter in practice because too many professors still lecture to passive audiences instead of challenging students to apply what they have learned to new questions.

Derek Bok

Although professors regard improving critical thinking as the most important goal of college, tests reveal that seniors who began their studies with average critical thinking skills have progressed only from the 50th percentile of entering freshmen t...

Derek Bok

I suspect that no community will become humane and caring by restricting what its members can say.

Derek Bok

Fewer than half of all university professors publish as much as one article per year.

Derek Bok

The college that takes students with modest entering abilities and improves their abilities substantially contributes more than the school that takes very bright students and helps them develop only modestly.

Derek Bok

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.

Derek Bok

I think the minority students that we admit to Harvard are every bit as meritorious as the white students that we admit.

Derek Bok

Early admission programs tend to advantage the advantaged.

Derek Bok

Freshly minted Ph.Ds typically teach the way their favorite professors taught.

Derek Bok

Universities are in a position where they can think very creatively.

Derek Bok

Author Bio

  • NameDerek Bok
  • DescriptionAmerican academic administrator and lawyer
  • BornMarch 22, 1930
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Educationist; University Professor