I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I would probably have been very content as a scholar to have carried on organising exhibitions and writing books and teaching.
I became an academic so that I could share my knowledge and experience with students.
I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.
The extra curricular activity in which I was most engaged - debating - helped shape my interests in public policy.
Virtually the only subject in which one could ever get a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge was classics. So I went to Oxford to study classics and, unlike Cambridge, it had a philosophy component, and I became completely transported by it.
I had the good fortune to be able to take a course with Margaret Mead. I had a fabulous art course, where it was explained to me that nothing exists in a vacuum, that everything is a result of the period in which it's done - the economics, the sociology, the politics, all sewn together. That was a very important lesson.
The public schools I attended were dominated by athletics and rarely inspiring intellectually, but I enjoyed a small circle of interesting friends despite my ineptitude at team sports and my preference for reading.
I hope to focus on what I'm passionate about because I think I'd do them best job on them - education, urban education, women and children's issues and literacy.
Following graduation from Amherst, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship enabled me to test the depth of my interest in literary scholarship by beginning graduate studies at Harvard University.
I did really well at school, and I would have loved to have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. I would have read English, and I'm really interested in politics.