It’s a fascinating story—it’s historic, it’s dramatic. I’m not sure it quite reaches the level of tragic, but there are tragic elements in it. Above all—and this will get lost in the left versus right sniping you’ll see in the next few weeks—it’s an important story. Ultimately a lot of the issues with Larry were about personality. At the same time, the underlying argument was about what kind of place a university ought to be. Not just any university, but the university I’ve argued is the most important in the world.

…I do get frustrated by ... caricatures of the Faculty, which are ubiquitous. They’re something the Faculty should be concerned about. There’s an odd willingness to believe that the faculty consists of knee-jerk left-wing Sixties-holdover radical crackpots. It’s obviously an unfair caricature of the Faculty. …The caricatures of the Faculty are about anti-intellectualism in the U.S.