Stefan Collini > Quotes

“In trying to justify the humanities, as in trying to live a life, what may turn out to matter most is holding one's nerve.”
― Stefan Collini

“Good work, like good talk or any other form of worthwhile human relationship, depends upon being able to assume an extended shared world.”
― Stefan Collini

“A different voice may be particularly effective in disturbing the existing participants into re-examining matters they had come to take for granted.”
― Stefan Collini

“Depth of understanding involves something which is more than merely a matter of deconstructive alertness; it involves a measure of interpretative charity and at least the beginnings of a wide responsiveness.”
― Stefan Collini

“Writing history inevitably involves the use of both the telescope and the microscope.”
― Stefan Collini, The Nostalgic Imagination: History in English Criticism

“History has many cunning passages’,”
― Stefan Collini, The Nostalgic Imagination: History in English Criticism

“In some quarters, and particularly among those who comment on these matters in in political circles or in the media or the blogosphere or other forms of public discussion, there is, without question, a strain of hostility and resentment likely to be encountered by anyone who attempts to characterize and emphasize the value of the intellectual life carried on in universities. Clearly, a wider anti-intellectualism feeds into this, something well charted in the US from at least Richard Hofstadter onwards and brilliantly diagnosed by Thorstein Veblen and others before that.

The narrower version of this response finds it pretty outrageous for academics to criticize or complain about anything to do with universities and their support and regulation by their host society. Along with more understandable and even perhaps justifiable sources of these reactions, we do have to recognize – and here is where I know I am particularly laying myself open to misunderstanding – the force of which Nietzche termed resentiment. There is a bitterness in these reactions, a combination of anger and sneering, together with a levelling intent, that far exceeds what might seem called for by any actual disagreement about the subject matter. And if I may be allowed to risk a little sally of speculative phenomenology, I think this reaction, for all its hostility and dismissiveness, encodes a twisted acknowledgement that there is something desirable, even enviable, about the role of the scholar or the scientist. Part of the reaction, of course, involves a resentment of the supposed security of tenure in a world with very little security of employment; some of it is a sense of how much autonomy, comparatively speaking, academics have in their working lives, how much flexibility in choosing their working hours and so on, in a world where, again, most people enjoy all too little autonomy. But some of it also may be a kind of grudging acknowledgement that the matters that scholars and scientists work on are in themselves more interesting, rewarding and perhaps humanly valuable than the matter most people have to devote their energies too in their working lives. Academics are the object of, simultaneously, envy and resentment because their roles seem to allow them to deal with intrinsically rewarding matters while being financially supported by the labour of others who are not privileged to work on such matters.”
― Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities

“Future historians, pondering changes in British society from the 1980s onwards, will struggle to account for the following curious fact. Although British business enterprises have an extremely mixed record – frequently posting gigantic losses, mostly failing to match overseas competitors, scarcely benefiting the weaker groups in society – and although various ‘arm’s length’ public institutions such as museums and galleries, the BBC and the universities have by and large a very good record (universally acknowledged creativity, streets ahead of most of their international peers, positive forces for human development and social cohesion), nonetheless the policies and the rhetoric of the past three decades have overwhelmingly emphasized the need for the second category of institutions to be forced to change so that they more closely resemble the first. Some of those future historians may even wonder why at the time there was so little concerted protest at this deeply implausible programme.”
― Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities

“Similar arguments apply to attempts to exempt the views or tastes of any group from reasoned appraisal and measured judgment. However well intentioned, all such attempts are, in the end, condescending. They assume that, in relation to a given topic, those who are in a disadvantaged "minority" (we are all minorities in relation to certain topics) need - in addition to efforts to remedy their disadvantage - the further protection of not having their most cherished convictions critically scrutinized. This in effect posits a two-tier society intellectually with the grown-ups deciding not just what may or may not be said in front of the children but who are to count as children in the first place. The eventually engenders a situation in which is it considered acceptable to criticize, mock, or give offence to those deemed to be among the privileged but not to those deemed to be among the less privileged - a moral asymmetry which is ultimately corrosive of genuine respect and equality.”
― Stefan Collini, That's Offensive!: Criticism, Identity, Respect