One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you're good at.

Harvard has something that manages, I think, to provide a lot of options for students, but still fairly prescriptive about the kinds of subjects that the courses ought to cover.

My own view is that the general education curriculum that a college picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student body that it has.

There are limits, after all, to the idea of limits.

I think at a place like Harvard, our experience, I was involved with, at various stages, in trying to implement a new general education curriculum, our experience was that Harvard's all about specialization, that's not just true of the professori, it's also true of a lot of the undergraduates, too, and they come, they kind of know what they want to do, they select it because they have a strong aptitude for something in particular.

Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic. Never, btw, ask that androgynous paper clip anything. S/he is just a stooge for management, leading you down more rabbit holes of options for things called Wizards, Macros, Templates, and Cascading Style Sheets.

Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.