A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.

Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.

Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world - which, like it or not, is modern reality.

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity.

I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions - which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years.

American high schools have physically imprisoned young people, stripped them of civil liberties and fed them a diet of p.c. pap.

The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.