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.

The job of the critic, as it might have been conceived in the 1950's or 1960's, was some kind of role of moral arbiter for people, not a huge number of people, but people who were, you know, fairly educated, well-placed people.

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.

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.

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.

Basically what you want in any profession - I would say the same thing if I were a lawyer or a doctor - is you want bright undergraduates to look at your profession as something they would be interested in getting into.