The rest of the faculty avoided me for fear that too close an association with the school leper might get… — Isaac Asimov
The rest of the faculty avoided me for fear that too close an association with the school leper might get them into trouble too. One of them, however, approached me cautiously once and, making sure we were not under observation, he told me that he was proud of me end of my bravery and continuing to fight for academic freedom.
I shrugged. “There’s no bravery about it. I have academic freedom and I can give it to you in two words.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Outside income,” I said.
It’s true. The average faculty member is under an enormous disadvantage in a fight with the administration. He need not even be fired, he need merely be harassed, and he must start looking for a new position. They are not easy to find and generally, if he waits too long, he might find he is fired and, without a salary, he can be in deep financial trouble.
p. 198Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Nor did I learn about sex from any reasoned source of instruction. I learned about it from the distorted and imperfect knowledge of other boys. This is the usual fate enforced upon youngsters by a society that is too prim and too hypocritical to have sex taught like any other branch of knowledge.
Considering how important sex is, how great a source of joy, how enormous a source of misery and disease, how is permeates the workings of courtship and marriage, isn’t it strange that we go to great lengths to teach our children to play football and make no effort whatever to teach them to play sex?
p. 93
There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don’t come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.
p. 421
Publishers, with their usual bravery, dumbed down their books in order to make money at the expense of leaving American children undereducated or, worse, miseducated.
p. 306
