But not everyone will sit down and go through the material without a professor pushing them to do the work.
And at what pace would the former Princeton professor push the Fed towards adopting a formal inflation target, an idea he had long championed?
Chua, who is Chinese-American and a Yale law professor, pushes her children to get straight A's, forces them to spend hours each day practicing piano and violin; they are not allowed to pursue loser activities like playing the drums, "which leads to drugs," she says, in a typical turn of phrase that may or may or may not be facetious.
This maxim, hammered into my head by university professors, pushed me to reconsider my ideas about "beauty" and "body confidence".
Pinkham says that his committee split with the M.T.A. earlier this year, though, in part because the professors pushed for material the M.T.A. deemed too sensitive.
Our professors pushed us to apply for grants that took us around the globe, and worked community service into our course requirements.
The money has been borrowed to build impressive new facilities, grow and enhance graduate research, and strive towards other goals in Jackson's ambitious Rensselaer Plan - but Napolitano and other former staff members told VICE News that undergraduate classes had grown in size, with professors pushed to increasingly focus on research as more undergrad students enrolled in the school.
Often artists and professors push the envelope of the mainstream and challenge the constructs.
Bloggers like Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who peddled the Ayers theory, and Ann Althouse, a law professor who pushed the plastic-device story, hold diametrically opposed views to those of Islamists and Arab nationalists.
The former Ohio attorney-general, who runs the CFPB's enforcement division, pipped Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard professor who pushed for the agency's creation in the wake of the financial crisis and has acted as special adviser to it.
