Education Quote by Orson Welles

Welles lands the joke with the breezy authority of someone who made his own curriculum and didn’t ask permission. “They teach anything in universities today” isn’t really about academic offerings; it’s a swipe at the inflation of prestige. The line implies a world where “university” has become less a marker of rigor than a vending machine for credentials, ready to wrap even the most unserious obsession in a serious-looking diploma.

“Major in mud pies” is doing double duty. It’s funny because it’s absurdly childish, a sandbox activity elevated into bureaucratic respectability. It’s also pointed because it’s not attacking learning itself so much as the institutional impulse to sanctify everything with a department, a syllabus, a major. Welles, the prodigy who conquered radio with War of the Worlds and Hollywood with Citizen Kane before he was 26, is essentially mocking the idea that legitimacy must be conferred from above. If talent can arrive fully formed, universities can start to look like gatekeepers protecting their own brand.

The subtext is also generational and class-coded: a mid-century cultural economy where “seriousness” is policed, where the arts are perpetually asked to justify themselves, and where the expansion of higher education triggers a backlash that often sounds like “kids these days.” Welles’s sting is that it’s plausible: once institutions sell “self-actualization,” the boundary between knowledge and lifestyle gets blurrier. The line endures because it weaponizes a childish image to puncture adult pretensions.