You want diversity in any intellectual organization. I mean, that's how good ideas arise.

For the kind of places I've written for and the kind of writing that I've done, the general way to think about your audience is to think about somebody who's like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.

Getting faculties to come to a consensus about something that they've never really thought about or had to worry about in their careers before can be a rather slow process and a long process, it certainly was the case at Harvard, and it's the case with most of the general education curricula that I know of, it takes four or five years just to get everybody on board with one idea.

Obviously input is helpful to faculty in trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it's the faculty's job to know what students need to know. Make a decision about it and present it.

I don't think that taste should be the decider of moral issues.

I do worry a lot about the time it takes for people to get a PhD, about the difficulty of finding employment, about the difficulty of getting tenure, and generally about the perception that undergraduates have, that this is a very high-risk career to get started.

I don't think people believe that any more, I don't think people think that it really matters whether you appreciate Henry James more than Theodore Dreiser.