I don't think that you want to see universities in any way trying to have any kind of quota system about political views, or views in general. You want the market to work in the way the market works.

I think that the idea that there's such a thing as a national literature that's somehow uniquely expressive of a national soul or culture or mentality is probably also something that nobody really believes in anymore.

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.

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

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 really usually push an agenda, and I don't feel that my main job is to persuade people of something. My main job is to help them think about something.

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.