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University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

The most frequent complaint I hear from college students is that professors inject their leftist political comments into their courses even when they have nothing to do with the subject.

I had a moment where I left journalism, and I started getting interested in this issue and writing about it, where I felt there was a right side and a wrong side around a lot of these issues relating to education.

It's very important that there should be cross-fertilisation between government and academia. Both parties can benefit from having a better understanding of how the other works.

Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument.

American colleges are now increasingly reflexive in maintaining politically correct dialogue over controversy, and some say universities have lost sight of education's ultimate purpose.

As you look around the country there are still a significant number of states where their whole school debate is over school funding and we've been focused on the quality debate for most of the '90s.

I had to make a choice - recede into the academic world, or wade into politics.

It is pretty hard to find the right result to a controversial issue.

This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking.