Speaking of Higher Education: The Academic's Book of Quotations (review)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any dinner speaker must be in want of a good quotation, or why else would this book exist? First, I must issue the requisite disclaimer: Bob Birnbaum asked me to contribute a bon mot for this volume, and I remember sending him one or two, but I swear I cannot remember which ones they were. He mentions me in his acknowledgments, so I know that I sent him one, but none of these jumped out to me as ones of my own excavation. If I had realized that he wanted quotations that were more smart-ass than serious, I would probably have taken more time to go through my library or my own writings, especially since he was even open to bathroom humor. (See p. 219, as just one example, for references to caca and testicle licking. Even so, my daily e-mail inbox spam has more graphic stuff than what is included here. Volume 2 should just concentrate on this phenomenon.)

All that said, this kind of work has its place; it will provide readers with time on their hands a few chuckles and dinner (or commencement address) speakers with many snide and self-deprecating asides for their remarks. Speaking of Higher Education is a Bartlett's of sorts, chockablock full of remarks by famous (sometimes) men (mostly) on a variety of academic subjects, although some are borrowed from an earlier volume of academic quotations (the 1995 International Education Quotations Encyclopaedia) and some even from Bartlett's itself. The internet has also provided some of the quotations, while one cranky offering from the dyspeptic conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr., was apparently confirmed by "personal communication" with the compiler.

I was a little surprised by the provenance of some of the quotations, such as the often-quoted remark about the reasons academic fights are so strident—because the stakes are so small. Birnbaum attributes this to Henry Kissinger, when I always thought it was by Woodrow Wilson. And some of these quotations date themselves quickly, such as one from Henry Rosovsky's wonderful 1990 The University: An Owner's Manual, where he likens the high quality of U.S. higher education to that of U.S. basketball, obviously written before the men's performance in this sport at the 2004 Athens Olympics. (A better and more quotable Rosovsky story is about faculty-student sexual relationships and John Kenneth Galbraith.)

If Birnbaum ever does a follow-up volume, I hope that he increases the number of quotations from rock-and-roll wellsprings. He does cite the immortal Fats Domino (from a Web site, on p. 92), but where are the more famous academics such as Professor Longhair, Chuck Berry ("With No Particular Place To Go"), Brian Wilson ("Be True to Your School"), Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders ("The Book of Love"), Sam Cooke ("What a Wonderful World It Would Be"), and the college-obsessed rapper Kanye West (College Dropout and Late Registration)? Now that would be worth the price of admission, and you could dance to it.