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.

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.

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.

Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.

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.

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

Universities are set up to get people to work together by having them disagree with each other.