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.

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.

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.

We have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other people's cultures and permitting ourselves to accept that there is more than one version of reality.

Sometimes people won't even finish a piece that you wrote, because they've already decided what it is that you want to say, and generally I, whatever I say in the first half of the piece, you should not assume I'm going to end up with, but they don't finish reading them. So, and people read fast and stuff.

It's very hard to know who your readers are, but that's who I'm... if I have somebody in my head, that's probably who it is.

When I was young, I went to college, had a teacher who was, had been a student of Trilling's at Columbia, this was in California. And he, I started reading him around that time, and then I went to Columbia as well, Trilling was still teaching there, I took a course with him. He was not a great teacher, but he was, when I was younger, he was a good model for the kind of criticism I wanted to do, because he thought very dialectically.