81 Quotes by Louis Menand

I don’t think that you want to see universities in any way trying to have any kind of quota system about political views, or views in general. You want the market to work in the way the market works.

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

Obviously input is helpful to faculty in trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it’s the faculty’s job to know what students need to know. Make a decision about it and present it.

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.

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 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.

They all believed that ideas are not “out there” waiting to be discovered, but are tools – like forks and knives and microchips – that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves.

I don’t really usually push an agenda, and I don’t feel that my main job is to persuade people of something. My main job is to help them think about something.

It was not a matter of choosing sides, it was a matter of rising above the whole concept of sideness.