Education Quote by Roald Hoffmann

There is a quiet provocation in Hoffmann leading with "I am a teacher" rather than Nobel-caliber credentials. In a culture that treats elite science as a relay race of grants, prestige, and specialized output, he chooses the identity that carries the least glamour and the most contact hours. The pride is pointed: it refuses the academic hierarchy where research is the star and teaching is the supporting labor everyone depends on but few are rewarded for.

The specificity of "Cornell University" and "primarily undergraduates" matters. Hoffmann isn’t describing mentorship as a flattering side hustle for future colleagues; he’s staking his reputation on the hard, unromantic work of explaining fundamentals to students who may be anxious, underprepared, or simply unsure why chemistry should matter to their lives. "First-year general chemistry" is doing extra rhetorical lifting: it signals the gatekeeper course, the one that sorts futures. By claiming it year after year, since 1966, he suggests a deliberate choice to stand at the bottleneck where scientific identity gets made or broken.

The subtext is also a defense of human-scale science. A computational chemist and public intellectual, Hoffmann knows knowledge doesn’t disseminate by citation alone; it moves through classrooms, through repetition, through the patience to translate abstraction into something a nineteen-year-old can hold. The long timeline reads like an argument about continuity: amid changing fashions in research and higher ed, the foundational act remains teaching, and he’s betting his legacy on that.