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).

The US is off the spectrum in religious commitment. It's been increasing since 1980 but it's a major part of the voting base of the Republican Party so that means committing to anti-abortion positions, opposing women's rights.

If you take a look at places like Harvard, it's striking. In the early ,50s, I think there were a handful of Jewish professors, three or four. But by the 1960s, there were Jewish deans and administrators. In fact, one of the reasons why MIT became a great university was because they admitted Jews whereas Harvard did not.

By most accounts, Aristide is the most popular figure in Haiti.

If you look at history, even recent history, you see that there is indeed progress. . . . Over time, the cycle is clearly, generally upwards. And it doesn't happen by laws of nature. And it doesn't happen by social laws. . . . It happens as a result of hard work by dedicated people who are willing to look at problems honestly, to look at them without illusions, and to go to work chipping away at them, with no guarantee of success — in fact, with a need for a rather high tolerance for failure along the way, and plenty of disappointments.

A good American friend of mine who has lived in India for many years, working as a journalist, was recently denied entry to the country because he wrote on Kashmir. This is a reflection of fractures within society. Pakistan, too, has to focus on the Lashkar [Lashkar-i-Taiba] and other similar groups and work towards some sort of sensible compromise on Kashmir.

Marx's early manuscripts, with their roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, derived fundamental concepts such as alienation from a conception of human nature - what we would call genetically determined.