Dartmouth is a small school with high-caliber teaching. Our classes were all taught by professors, not teaching assistants. I felt like that was a school where I could make a big splash. The opportunities would be grander and more robust for me there than at a school with 40,000 students.
I don't believe in firing professors. They have academic freedom.
I was genuinely lucky to have the professors I did, many of whom took a very humanist approach in teaching history that went beyond memorizing dates and battles and all of that - basically, looking at the life of individuals throughout history, aided by fascinating primary sources.
Both my parents are professors, and I never really saw people do any other jobs, so I didn't really know how to want a different kind of job.
Harvard prides itself on its diversity - economic, racial, social, geographical - but it remains intellectually segregated. It's not what conservative commentators seem to imagine - a bastion of liberal professors force-feeding radical opinions to a naive student body.
Ideally, I'd love to write poems that intrigued humans across the board: literary folk and academics as well as... dog-walkers, doctors, plumbers, chefs, math professors, jugglers, etc.
Professors who hold unpopular positions or state inconvenient facts are now considered psychologically toxic.
Very few parents keep up with who the top professors are or whose classes their kids are taking, partially because most undergraduates interact more commonly with graduate students.
There's a real difference of what one believed was one's chief responsibility between American professors and Chinese professors. This was vividly revealed to me when I compared what I could learn in Chicago and what I could learn in China.
Business school professors don't take selling seriously because they don't know how to sell. It's easy to talk about business theory and production time and just-in-time development. Selling is much more difficult.
