I think the First Amendment is a very positive statement. It didn't mean what we now want it to mean. It didn't mean that there shall be no law abridging freedom of speech. What it meant was Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech, the federal government could make no law. And of course within a decade of the enactment of the Bill of Rights we had the Alien and Sedition Act which was one of the most oppressive political correctness doctrines ever enacted.

What strikes me from reading your book is your role as cultural critic--a man of letters, as they would have said in the 19th century. Did you have this in mind when you first began to study law?

No, law was always first in my mind. I think that role became obvious to me when I first came to Harvard in 1964. There I was at Harvard (which was the Establishment). And yet because of who I was a--Jewish kid from New York who didn't want to change--I found myself to be very much of an outsider. I was an outsider in an inside institution.

My own sense as a teacher is that you can't make students think without making them squirm. I'm appalled at the amount of bad teaching at this institution in the sense of teachers who want to be popular and who are happy when their classes end with a bunch of smiling students.

This is not a massage parlor. This is a university. If you want to feel good at the end of a class, go get a rub down. If you want to think, you have to sweat and squirm and be made very uncomfortable in class.

When I leave a class with my students smiling I have failed. When I leave a class with my students angry, squirming, furious at me and furious at what they've been confronted with in class, I've had a successful class.

That's why I make it a point both in my writing and in my teaching to confront the conventional wisdoms whether the conventional wisdoms be feminism on campus today or gay rights or civil rights. I support all those doctrines, but not in class.

If you're an opponent of the death penalty and you can't beat me in an argument then you're not going to beat Justice Rehnquist, or Justice Scalia. So I make the argument for the death penalty and try to make you come up with better arguments. If you're a strident feminist who believes that convicting accused rapists is more important than civil liberties, you're going to have to make that argument to me successfully. I'm not just going to pat you on the head and say, "Nice argument."

It's interesting that you say the University brought this out in you because many people, like Russell Jacoby in his book The Last Intellectuals, argue that the universities and the tenure process are signaling the end of broad cultural criticism since academics are forced to impress the chairs of the various departments. They have to confine themselves to writing to their colleagues.

I think there is some truth to that. When I think about the law school here where people seem to take sides--either your a "Crit," a member of the critical legal studies, or you're in law of economics. I can't imagine myself being a member of a club like that.

I also think it's more subtle than the way some of the more recent critics have put it. Tenure is a necessary evil. Some people emphasize evil. Some people emphasize necessary. But there's only one justification for tenure. Tenure gives you the right and the responsibility not to be popular.

I think too many professors are looking at their student evaluations and looking at their popularity. I can understand that until you get tenure. But the minute you get tenure, it seems to me you have an obligation not to care what your students think, not to care what your colleagues think, but to pursue an agenda of seeking truth through your own rights.

You don't have to worry in an institution like this that we'll breed conformity. We're so different. It would be better if we were even more diverse but we have a tremendously intellectual group of people and if people only thought things through for themselves and stopped asking themselves, "Will this get me admitted to this club or that club? Will this make me popular with the students? I think you'd have better teaching and students would get more out of the school.

In the Stephen Thernstrom case, he felt like he couldn't teach with the protests and the disruptions. Do you think he had an obligation to continue on?

I think the University had an obligation to make it more comfortable for him to teach as he chose to teach.