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.

Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.

It's difficult to get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as teaching assistants or instructors by their schools, by their schools where they're graduate students, and that does become exploitative eventually because they're very cheap labor and there's a way in which in it's not in the institution's interest to give them a degree if they can continue to employ them, I don't think anybody thinks that way, but effectively that's the way the system is starting to work.

Most Americans who made it past the fourth grade have a pretty good idea who Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr., were. Not many Americans have even heard of Alice Paul, Howard W. Smith, and Martha Griffiths. But they played almost as big a role in the history of women’s rights as Marshall and King played in the history of civil rights for African-Americans. They gave women the handle to the door to economic opportunity, and nearly all the gains women have made in that sphere since the nineteen-sixties were made because of what they did.

If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky. Decades can be parsed. Television, frequently accused of destabilizing life, is actually what stitches the segments together.

I do worry a lot about the time it takes for people to get a PhD, about the difficulty of finding employment, about the difficulty of getting tenure, and generally about the perception that undergraduates have, that this is a very high-risk career to get started.

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.