Yes, I took a remedial algebra course in college. I struggled in math in high school and didn’t have confidence to plunge in with a for-credit algebra course. The remedial course gave me a lot of confidence so that when I took the for-credit algebra course it was fairly easy and I got a ‘B,’ of which I remain proud today!
I never went to church when I was in college, either.
You didn't question - kind of like, you would go to college. You would wear a tie to work. You would, you know, you would work for 40 years. And then you would play golf for three years, and then you would die. That was how I was raised.
I was raised in a family where my father was the first one to go to college.
I knew I was the second-best tennis player in the state of Florida and No. 8 in the United States of America when I was 12 years old and I couldn't tell you what I was in baseball, but I liked my chances in tennis of getting a scholarship to college.
Am I going to be able to provide a real home for her, man? An education? A real life? What's her college application going to look like: 'Raised on Spooky Island by wizard with GED, please help'?
Twenty years ago the Oklahoma City bombing seared the concept of terrorism on American soil into our national consciousness and proved that we are all vulnerable, even in the heartland. I was in college at Rice University in 1995. All of us remember exactly where we were that day, and we will never forget the 168 people who were killed. Terrorism is evil, yet the incredible response to tragedies like we experienced in Oklahoma 20 years ago serve to highlight the strength, resolve, and resiliency of the American people to the world.
Basically, my senior year of high school, I was going to look at prospective colleges and I went to visit Northeastern University because one of my friends was going.
I was shaped in college into a performance artist. I never really thought of myself as being one singular thing. I think of myself as an artist and I feel no restrictions when it comes to how I want to portray what I want to portray.
The freedom I experienced as a dance major in college gave me so much, but the reality of being in school is that you are still forced to work under restrictions.
I didn't go to university. They offered me a job as a junior reporter and I went off to work for the Southern Reporter. They sent me to college to do my NCTJ, which is a professional exam for journalists, and I started work as a print journalist purely because I was just a pest. They couldn't think of anything other than giving me a job to stop me hanging around.
For a lot of women who don't go to college, or for a lot of women who aren't in New York or D.C. or someplace where there's like a large feminist organization they can get involved in, they may be doing feminist work, right, like locally or with a grassroots organization or in their own lives, but if they don't have that support system and if they don't have that availability to feminist language, I think we're missing out on something.
I grew up definitely a feminist, but I didn't call myself a feminist until I took my first women's studies class in college.
I think the idea that feminism is dead is dangerous because it leads women and men to believe that (1) they don't have to do anything; the work has been done, and that everything is okay now; and (2) it leaves them kind of alone, I think, in a struggle, and that's something I've seen a lot when I go to colleges and I speak to young women.
Basically, I was always very interested in comedy, but I was much more sort of academic. And then, after college, loaded with my art history degree, I decided to go work at Comedy Central as a temp.
I've spent my entire adult life teaching at colleges of various kinds, all of them very different from Yale, and I have a fairly cynical perspective on what elite institutions - and the privileges they embody - represent in America.
I went to Gettysburg College, where the famous Civil War battle was fought. I majored in English. I would've liked to major in writing, but they didn't offer a major in that.
When comics came along in the 1930s there was a talent pool waiting. And one reason is so many areas were closed to Jews. Colleges, advertising agencies, many of the corporations - the doors that were closed led to the one that was open.
No one has found a gene for IQ. "Heritability" means that identicial twins are more similar than fraternal twins, right? Fraternal twins more similar than non-siblings. The heritability is 50 percent if your parents went to college. But if your parents never graduated high school the heritability is zero. Zero.
In college you learn about college
At the beginning of my career, fresh out of college, I did everything that I could do. And now I'm a little bit more selective. I think that's sort of a natural process.
I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.
When we graduated from college and law school, we had a mountain of debt.
The most powerful recent innovation in government is when states aggressively use community colleges for retraining. In Michigan, where large numbers of workers were displaced from the manufacturing industry, we created a wildly successful program: No Worker Left Behind.
Our great history has been that people came to Michigan because you didn't have to have a college degree to get a good-paying job. Consequently, we have got a larger number of our population that right now are facing outsourcing, et cetera, without higher or advanced degrees.
