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

The time between Bachelor's degree and a PhD, the median time is over 11 years. So then you're still only on a tenure ladder, you're not tenured. So it generally takes 6 to 8 years after that to get tenure. So that's a very long period of what's essentially apprenticeship, of insecurity.

If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky. Decades can be parsed. Television, frequently accused of destabilizing life, is actually what stitches the segments together.

Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It's quotable because it's been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority.

It's difficult to get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as teaching assistants or instructors by their schools, by their schools where they're graduate students, and that does become exploitative eventually because they're very cheap labor and there's a way in which in it's not in the institution's interest to give them a degree if they can continue to employ them, I don't think anybody thinks that way, but effectively that's the way the system is starting to work.

One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.

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.