Latest Louis Menand Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Louis Menand

  Fun, Thinking, Literature

  Source: bigthink.com

• I'm not one of the people who has a kind of scholarly hat and writes in a certain way for an academic audience and then puts on a public intellectual hat and writes a different way for a different kind of readership. I generally write the way I write, no matter what and it seems to have worked for me.

  Louis Menand

  Writing, People, Intellectual

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• I suppose everybody does get attached to characters whether in movies or in stories, but I think that's part of the reason you get involved with literature is because there's somebody that grabs you about it and then you want to figure out why.

  Louis Menand

  Character, Thinking, Doe

  Source: bigthink.com

• One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you're good at.

  Louis Menand

  Care, Good Things, Professors

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• 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.

  Louis Menand

  Reading, People, Pieces

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• If you write for the New Yorker, you always get people critiquing your grammar, you can count on it. So, because a lot of New Yorker readers are kind of, you know, amateur grammarians and so you do get a lot of that.

  Louis Menand

  Writing, People, Kind

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.

  Louis Menand

  Writing, Oddities, Ideas

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• 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.

  Louis Menand

  Jobs, Teaching, School

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• 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.

  Louis Menand

  Doe, Lines, Trends

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• 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.

  Louis Menand

  Thinking, Views, Political

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• 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.

  Louis Menand

  Years, Long, Insecurity

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• 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.

  Louis Menand

  Careers, People, Worry

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• 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.

  Louis Menand

  People, Professors, Educated

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• Universities are set up to get people to work together by having them disagree with each other.

  Louis Menand

  People, Working Together, University

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• 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.

  Louis Menand

  Doctors, Would Be, Looks

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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

  Louis Menand

  Mean, Organization, Ideas

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• 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.

  Louis Menand

  Thinking, Discipline, Curriculum

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• Getting faculties to come to a consensus about something that they've never really thought about or had to worry about in their careers before can be a rather slow process and a long process, it certainly was the case at Harvard, and it's the case with most of the general education curricula that I know of, it takes four or five years just to get everybody on board with one idea.

  Louis Menand

  Years, Careers, Ideas

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• The way universities operate is the decision about what students need for the degree are... is the decision made by the faculty.

  Louis Menand

  Decision, Degrees, Needs

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• 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.

  Louis Menand

  Jobs, Decision, Trying

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• You have to have students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you're not going, they're not going to be very effective.

  Louis Menand

  Students, Courses

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• 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.

  Louis Menand

  Thinking, Students, Kind

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body.

  Louis Menand

  Thinking, Body, Curriculum

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• I think at a place like Harvard, our experience, I was involved with, at various stages, in trying to implement a new general education curriculum, our experience was that Harvard's all about specialization, that's not just true of the professori, it's also true of a lot of the undergraduates, too, and they come, they kind of know what they want to do, they select it because they have a strong aptitude for something in particular.

  Louis Menand

  Strong, Thinking, Trying

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• 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.

  Louis Menand

  College, Views, Body

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.