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.

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.

I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.

A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism, and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of becoming a journalist.

For the kind of places I've written for and the kind of writing that I've done, the general way to think about your audience is to think about somebody who's like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.

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.

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.