NYU Alumni Magazine: Heard on Campus

“It’s very liberating to have a flop. Just remember that, because everyone has them.”

—Tina Brown, founder of The Daily Beast Web site and former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, on her now−defunct Talk magazine at the “Staying Current, Clickable, and Profitable” event, hosted by the school of continuing and professional studies

“The tropics inebriated [Darwin]. Recording in his diary his first encounter with tropical vegetation, he wrote, ‘It has been a glorious day, giving the blind man eyes.’ ”

—Rutgers University English professor George Levine at a lecture on “Learning to See: Darwin’s Prophetic Apprenticeship on the Beagle Voyage” during a gallatin school of individualized study conference celebrating the scientist’s bicentennial

“American leadership is the only thing that will move [the Arab Peace Initiative] forward. We need the big bear behind our backs to push us, so when others ask, we can point to the big bear.”

—Prince Turki Al−Faisal, former ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States, speaking at the School of Continuing and Professional Studies event, “Global Leaders: Conversations With Alon Ben−Meir”

“I joke with my students that I’m hoping to win a Nobel Prize because I’m going to show conclusively that, after several years of NIH−funded research, we’ve discovered the treatment for malnutrition, and it’s called food.”

—Paul Farmer, medical anthropologist and physician at Harvard Medical School, at a “Social Entrepreneurship in the 21st−Century” event hosted by the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation Program in Social Entrepreneurship