'We are supposed to develop questioning minds, you know,’ someone muttered.
‘Yes, but not regarding university policy!’ said Ridcully. (DW)
‘Yes, but not regarding university policy!’ said Ridcully. (DW)
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'We’ve kept all this very simple so that even professors can understand!' (DW)
The senior wizards trod carefully in the High Energy Magic Building, partly because it wasn’t their natural habitat, but also because most of the students who frequented it used the floor as a filing cabinet and, distressing, a larder. Pizza is quite hard to remove from a sole, especially the cheese. (DW)
Right now he was present in his position as Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic, and his long-term purpose was to see that his department’s budget went through on the nod. (GP)
'He says that if the faculty get to know one another better, they’ll be a happier, more efficient team.’
‘But they do know one another. They’ve known one another for ages! That’s why they don’t like one another very much.' (TG) Rincewind was the least senior member of the faculty. Indeed, the Archchancellor had made it clear that in seniority terms he ranked somewhat lower than the things that went ‘click’in the woodwork. He got no salary and had complete insecurity of tenure. On the other hand, he got his laundry done free, a place at mealtimes and a bucket of coal a day. He also had his own office, no one ever visited him and he was strictly forbidden from attempting to teach anything to anyone. In academic terms, therefore, he considered himself pretty lucky. (TG)
A university is very much like a coral reef. It provides calm waters and food particles for delicate yet marvellously constructed organisms that could not possible survive in the pounding surf of reality, where people ask questions like ‘Is what you do of any use?’ and other nonsense. (SODW)
Some questions should not be asked. However, someone always does.
‘How does it work?’ said Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully, the Master of Unseen University. This was the kind of question that Ponder Stibbons hated almost as much as ‘How much will it cost?’ They were two of the hardest questions a researcher ever had to face. (SODW) 'A good wizard, Rincewind,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘Not particularly bright, but, frankly, I’ve never been quite happy with intelligence. An overrated talent, in my humble opinion.' (LH)
The problem, of course, was the frogs. Not rains of frogs, which were uncommon now in Ankh-Morpork, but specifically foreign treefrogs from the humid jungles of Klatch. They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn’t be too much education wasted. (TT)
The wizards had spent a lot of time in an atmosphere where a cutting remark did more damage than a magic sword and, for sheer malign pleasure, a well structured memo could do more real damage than a fireball every time. (LC)
... the great, open ingenious purpose of UU was to be the weight on the arm of magic, causing it to swing with grave majesty like a pendulum rather than spin with deadly purpose like a morningstar. Instead of hurling fireballs at one
another from fortified towers the wizards learned to snipe at their colleagues over the interpretation of Faculty Council minutes, and long ago were amazed to find that they got just as much vicious fun out of it. They consumed big dinners, and after a really good meal and a fine cigar even the most rabid Dark Lord is inclined to put his feet up and feel amicable towards the world, especially if it offered him another brandy. (LC) 'But we’re a university! We have to have a library!’ said Ridcully. ‘It adds tone. What sort of people would we be if we
didn’t go into the Library?’ ‘Students,’ said the Senior Wrangler morosely. (LC) The unofficial entrance to the University has always been known only to students. What most students failed to remember was that the senior members of the faculty had also been students once, and also liked to get out and about after the official shutting of the gates. This naturally led to a certain amount of embarrassment and diplomacy on dark
evenings. (J) ... therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason. (IT)
Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, teaching had to be one of them. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and had perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all right because, to be fair, so had the students.
The system worked quite well and, as happens in such cases, had taken on the status of tradition. Lectures clearly took place, because they were down there on the timetable in black and white. The fact that no-one attended was an irrelevant detail. It was occasionally maintained that this meant that the lectures did not in fact happen at all, but no-one ever attended them to find out if this was true. Anyway, it was argued (by the Reader in Woolly Thinking – which is like Fuzzy Logic, only less so) that lectures had taken place in essence, so that was all right, too. (IT) The students were staring at her in the manner of those who have heard of the species ‘female’ but have never expected to get this close to one. (SM)
'Students?'
‘Er. Yes?’ said Ponder, backing away. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it? I mean, this is a university…’ Ridcully scratched his ear. The man was right of course. You had to have some of the buggers around, there was no getting away from it. Personally, he avoided them whenever possible, as did the rest of the faculty, occasionally running the other way or hiding behind doors whenever they saw them. The Lecturer in Recent Runes had been known to lock himself in his wardrobe rather than take a tutorial. (SM) The post of Senior Wrangler was an unusual one, as was the name itself. In some centres of learning, the Senior Wrangler is a leading philosopher; in others, he’s merely someone who looks after horses. The Senior Wrangler at UnseenUniversity was a philosopher who looked like a horse, thus neatly encapsulating all definitions. (RM)
'Students?' barked the Archchancellor.
‘Yes, Master. You know? They’re the thinner ones with the pale faces? Because we’re a university? They come with the whole thing, like rats-’ (SM) Spelter thought: patronage. He’d heard the term used, though never within the University, and he knew
it meant getting those above you to give you a leg up. Of course, no wizard would normally dream of giving a colleague a leg up unless it was in order to catch them on the hop. (S) He was stupid, yes, in the particular way that very clever people can be stupid, and maybe he had all the tact of an avalanche and was as self-centred as a tornado, but it would never have occurred to him that children were important enough to be unkind to. (ER)
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