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.

One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.

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 way universities operate is the decision about what students need for the degree are... is the decision made by the faculty.

You want diversity in any intellectual organization. I mean, that's how good ideas arise.

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.