The American escalation of the war in Laos provoked a response by the Communist forces, which now control more of Laos than ever before.

I think the most important work that is going on has to do with the search for very general and abstract features of what is sometimes called universal grammar: general properties of language that reflect a kind of biological necessity rather than logical necessity; that is, properties of language that are not logically necessary for such a system but which are essential invariant properties of human language and are known without learning. We know these properties but we don't learn them. We simply use our knowledge of these properties as the basis for learning.

If the United States is accommodating, the North Koreans become accommodating. If the United States is hostile, they become hostile.

Part of the NAFTA legislation required studies of labor practices, and there was quite a good study that came out by a labor historian on the use of NAFTA to undermine and destroy unions.

Politicians don't want democracy here in America, why would they want it in the Middle East?

On the other hand, you have to balance that against expanding our nuclear forces, add to our so-called depleted military, which is already more powerful than the rest of the world combined; attack in Syria, send forces to Syria, start bombing. Who knows what could be next?

Personally, I am uneasy about the notion of "a politically engaged university," for reasons I wrote about over 30 years ago, at the height of protest and resistance (reprinted in For Reasons of State).