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

Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic. Never, btw, ask that androgynous paper clip anything. S/he is just a stooge for management, leading you down more rabbit holes of options for things called Wizards, Macros, Templates, and Cascading Style Sheets.

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.

We have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other people's cultures and permitting ourselves to accept that there is more than one version of reality.

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.

Harvard has something that manages, I think, to provide a lot of options for students, but still fairly prescriptive about the kinds of subjects that the courses ought to cover.

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