I haven't been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I'm not silent.

If you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.

When [my dad] was at the University of Michigan, my mom was a social-worker. As he rose, he voted for [Adlai] Stevenson initially. Then he voted for [Dwight] Eisenhower. Then he kept voting Republican until he voted for Barack Obama. So that's kind of amazing. But he was offered a cabinet post by Eisenhower in his second term. So he was moderate Republican. But if you asked him, he would've said, "I don't have any politics. I'm a business person." Mainstream, the American view, as he understood it.

I find some unity with Ron Paul.

That's in the nature of social change. So you can analyze what didn't work, but it's very hard to predict what will work.

So we were ecstatic and we swirled around spontaneously, the campus in Ann Harbor and about 4,000 of us landed on the steps of the president of the University of Michigan's home.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.