Success Quote by William Kirby

"Another goal is to look to the resources we have and to see how we could do better to plan, in a sense, for the faculty and infrastructure that we will need to study Asia well into the 21st century"

William Kirby, Scientist

About this Quote

“Another goal” is the giveaway: Kirby isn’t offering a grand vision so much as slipping a big agenda into the minutes. The sentence sounds administrative, even sleepy, but it’s doing the classic institutional move of converting curiosity into capacity. The real subject isn’t Asia; it’s “resources,” “faculty,” and “infrastructure” - the machinery that decides what counts as knowledge and who gets to produce it. Framed this way, studying Asia becomes less an encounter with a complex set of societies and more a project to be staffed, funded, and managed. That’s the intent: build permanence. Make “Asia” an enduring line item rather than a passing interest.

The subtext is that expertise doesn’t just happen; it’s engineered. Kirby’s “plan” language implies scarcity and competition: if you don’t invest now, you’ll fall behind later. It also smuggles in a power dynamic. To “study Asia well into the 21st century” (anachronistic for a 1759-1850 figure, which already suggests misattribution or a modern paraphrase) echoes the long Western tradition of treating Asia as an object of strategic understanding. Knowledge is positioned as preparedness.

Context matters because “faculty and infrastructure” are the quiet instruments of cultural authority: endowed chairs, archives, language programs, research travel, libraries. These choices shape what questions get asked, what voices get amplified, and what kinds of “Asia” are legible to the institution. The sentence works by sounding modest while lobbying for an entire epistemic architecture - one that can outlast fashions, politics, and, not incidentally, dissent.

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Topic	Vision & Strategy
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About the Author

William Kirby (September 19, 1759 - July 4, 1850) was a Scientist from England.

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