I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.

You have to have students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you're not going, they're not going to be very effective.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.