Berkeleyan
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Well Said

Quotes, bon mots, and noteworthy utterances from the campus and beyond

10 September 2009

"There has been much talk of late about the ‘core' mission of the university. My view is that we in the humanities and social sciences stand at the core of the core…."

Townsend Center for the Humanities Director Anthony Cascardi,, in the center's Bulletin, Sept./Oct.

"Skilled immigrants create more jobs than they take away. That is a fact."

Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at the School of Information, noting that skilled immigrants — among other achievements — started one in four U.S. engineering and technical startups between 1995 and 2005. Washington Post ("Tech Crunch"), Aug. 31

"First class ever taken at Berkeley: an entire course on Lolita. Grinned like an idiot through the whole first hour."

A tweet by undergrad twitterer Mark Haas, posted on InBerkeley.com, Aug. 31

"Pollan is . . . one of those people who believe that . . .you should eat only foods grown or killed within your line of sight (for me, that would be my neighbor's cat)."

Op-ed contributor Charlotte Allen, inveighing against Michael Pollan and the cadre of "foodie snobs and lefty social critics" who follow him and who, she claims, would force everyone to spend more on food in a time of economic crisis. Los Angeles Times, Aug. 30

"Whether or not a guarantee of quality is a contractual obligation, it's implicit in the project itself."

Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, an adjunct professor at the School of Information, chiding Google's book-scanning project (see story, page 5) for its failure to provide essential metadata for the books it processes, limiting their usefulness to scholars. Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 31