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.

The difficulty with coming up with a curriculum is mainly that faculty aren't trained to think in terms of general education. They're trained to think in terms of their own discipline, or their specialty.

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

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.

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

I'm not one of the people who has a kind of scholarly hat and writes in a certain way for an academic audience and then puts on a public intellectual hat and writes a different way for a different kind of readership. I generally write the way I write, no matter what and it seems to have worked for me.

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