Sound Bites

"It is a complex power dynamic, when these mainstream white male writers are in need of the famous African-American woman's promotion." —Theresa A. Kulbaga, an English professor at Miami University, in a campus lecture titled "The Oprah-fication of Memoir"

"Political Science majors now have a new senior exercise: each student is assigned a developing country. They then have twenty-four hours to impose a stilted, ill-fitting bastardization of liberal democracy upon that country." —Reporting from the Kenyon Collegiate, a mock version of the student newspaper

"I profoundly hope that in the evening shades ahead of you—those evening shades ahead of us all—your memory of Kenyon may indeed be a calling bell, and I hope that that bell may register upon you in a chord of harmony, which will remind you of a harmony in which once you dwelt." —English professor Perry Lentz addressing the Class of 2009 at Baccalaureate

"I recommend that you become writers—all of you ... To be sure, you will be opting for a life of poverty. But a writer is supposed to be poor. When a crooked or incompetent CEO winds up penniless, people laugh in his face. That won't happen to your face. And where others have to manufacture lives of paranoia, touchiness, rejection, and self-loathing, those qualities will already have been built into your profession." —Writer Roger Rosenblatt addressing the Class of 2009 at the one hundred eighty-first Commencement