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 More Quotes by Louis Menand More Quotes From Louis Menand 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 pieces reading people 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 kind writing people 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 doe character thinking 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 professors care good-things 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 intellectual writing people 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 courses students 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 trying thinking The job of the critic, as it might have been conceived in the 1950's or 1960's, was some kind of role of moral arbiter for people, not a huge number of people, but people who were, you know, fairly educated, well-placed people. Louis Menand numbers jobs people I don't think people believe that any more, I don't think people think that it really matters whether you appreciate Henry James more than Theodore Dreiser. Louis Menand believe people thinking I think that the idea that there's such a thing as a national literature that's somehow uniquely expressive of a national soul or culture or mentality is probably also something that nobody really believes in anymore. Louis Menand believe ideas thinking When I was young, I went to college, had a teacher who was, had been a student of Trilling's at Columbia, this was in California. And he, I started reading him around that time, and then I went to Columbia as well, Trilling was still teaching there, I took a course with him. He was not a great teacher, but he was, when I was younger, he was a good model for the kind of criticism I wanted to do, because he thought very dialectically. Louis Menand reading teaching teacher It's very hard to know who your readers are, but that's who I'm... if I have somebody in my head, that's probably who it is. Louis Menand hard reader knows 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. Louis Menand discipline writing thinking I don't think that taste should be the decider of moral issues. Louis Menand issues taste thinking One of the functions of literary criticism, or reviewing, generally - and I, most of my reviews actually are not about literature - but one of the functions of that is basically the sort of Consumer Reports function of letting readers know whether this is something they want to read. Louis Menand criticism literature want I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature. Louis Menand people art thinking 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 body college views I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body. Louis Menand curriculum body thinking 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 trends lines doe 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 teaching jobs school
