“(The course) is about race and American society, ... What I want to do is bring all these issues that this Hurricane Katrina debate has brought forward - I want to bring them out. I want to talk about affirmative action, crime and punishment, schools and the test score cap, urban politics and the history of the civil rights movement, and try to bring all these different elements together in a contemporary course.”
“The facilities are magnificent, the campus is beautiful - I even like living four days a week in Providence, which I never thought I was going to do,”
“One day, I was reading the New York Times and there was a front page story about Simmons and the Plan for Academic Enrichment, ... So that just got me to thinking, so I picked up the phone and asked if anybody was interested down there.”
“This is a very exciting place, ... The potential to do something here seemed to be really quite great and I was persuaded after talking with the leadership at the University ... that the kind of thing that I wanted to do on race and inequality would be perfect here. It just seemed too good of an opportunity to pass up.”
“The graduate course will be going through the theories of inequality, inequalities of all kinds - why some countries are slower to grow than others, why some regions within countries are left behind, why some groups, whether racial, ethnic or whatever (are left behind),”
“It was a terrible thing, ... The bottom line is that I was involved with a young woman and it went sour, and some allegations which were not true about me assaulting her were made.”
“What I was wrong about was not realizing that in my saying those things in the way I said them had political consequences, ... It wasn't just a matter about being right. Being right about something isn't good enough. You also have to be smart about it.”
