"It was always assumed that I would go to college"
About this Quote
That single, passive construction - "It was always assumed" - tells you more about Paul D. Boyer than a tidy origin myth ever could. The line isn’t bragging; it’s reporting a social fact. College, in this telling, isn’t an individual aspiration but an expectation already baked into the environment around him. The subject of the sentence is almost missing on purpose: not "I decided", not "I fought", but a quiet pressure from family, teachers, class, and community that preselects a future.
Coming from a 20th-century American scientist, the remark also signals something historically specific: the era when higher education was hardening into a pipeline for the professional-managerial class, and when scientific careers increasingly depended on formal credentials, institutional patronage, and access to labs rather than lone-genius mythology. Boyer’s work in biochemistry - culminating in a Nobel Prize - required immersion in that system. The quote nods to the infrastructure behind achievement: the guidance counselors, the norms, the money (or the assumption that money could be found), the cultural permission to keep studying.
There’s a muted critique in the blandness. "Always assumed" is the kind of phrase that reveals privilege precisely because it doesn’t recognize itself as privilege. Many brilliant people grow up with different default assumptions: work first, contribute now, don’t accrue debt, don’t overreach. Boyer’s sentence functions like a control sample in an experiment - a baseline condition that makes everything else possible, and therefore easy to overlook.
Coming from a 20th-century American scientist, the remark also signals something historically specific: the era when higher education was hardening into a pipeline for the professional-managerial class, and when scientific careers increasingly depended on formal credentials, institutional patronage, and access to labs rather than lone-genius mythology. Boyer’s work in biochemistry - culminating in a Nobel Prize - required immersion in that system. The quote nods to the infrastructure behind achievement: the guidance counselors, the norms, the money (or the assumption that money could be found), the cultural permission to keep studying.
There’s a muted critique in the blandness. "Always assumed" is the kind of phrase that reveals privilege precisely because it doesn’t recognize itself as privilege. Many brilliant people grow up with different default assumptions: work first, contribute now, don’t accrue debt, don’t overreach. Boyer’s sentence functions like a control sample in an experiment - a baseline condition that makes everything else possible, and therefore easy to overlook.
Quote Details
| Topic | Student |
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