Louis Menand Quotes

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.

My own view is that the general education curriculum that a college picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student body that it has.

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.

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.

For the kind of places I’ve written for and the kind of writing that I’ve done, the general way to think about your audience is to think about somebody who’s like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.

Cognitive science is a rapidly developing area, so it could be that there are some surprises around the corner. That does seem to be kind of where the trend line is leading.

I think in general there’s no point in going into a field like English literature if you’re not going to have fun with it.

It’s generally sort of sociologically observed that the better educated people are, the more liberal they tend to be, which would suggest that professors are going to be more liberal than the general public.

Just in higher education alone, more people go to college now, by enormous amounts, than went to college in the ’50’s and ’60’s. So that represents a whole new literate public that’s a consumer of literature, of news, of print, of, you know, opinion. And that’s a bigger audience and much more diverse audience than it used to be.

Sometimes people won’t even finish a piece that you wrote, because they’ve already decided what it is that you want to say, and generally I, whatever I say in the first half of the piece, you should not assume I’m going to end up with, but they don’t finish reading them. So, and people read fast and stuff.

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

The short story is not as restrictive as the sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. …at the end there has to be the literary equivalent of the magician’s puff of smoke, an outcome that is both startling and anticipated.