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.
Louis MenandGetting 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.
Louis MenandItโs all in the genesโ: an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are. Why should someone feel unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living in the freest and most prosperous nation on earth? It canโt be the system! There must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere.
Louis MenandI think at a place like Harvard, our experience, I was involved with, at various stages, in trying to implement a new general education curriculum, our experience was that Harvard's all about specialization, that's not just true of the professori, it's also true of a lot of the undergraduates, too, and they come, they kind of know what they want to do, they select it because they have a strong aptitude for something in particular.
Louis MenandOne 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.
Louis Menand