a snappy quote, not in YBQ

[Shapiro, Fred]

Presumably Sexton was talking about Columbia. :)  But the statement is clearly fallacious, as it would imply that New Haven, Ithaca, Princeton, New Jersey, Ann Arbor, and other small towns with major universities are "world-class cities" or will become world-class cities in the future.

Fred Shapiro


________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of George Thompson [george.thompson at nyu.edu]
Sent: Friday, September 13, 2013 12:13 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: a snappy quote, not in YBQ

I throw this out among you, rather in the spirit of one tossing a pilchard
toward a rock full of seals.

>From the New Yorker, September 9, 2013, p. 67, col. 3, in a profile of John
Sexton, president of New York University.

He repeated a quote attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "If you want to
build a world-class city, build a great university and wait two hundred
years."

--
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.

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