A highly regarded English professor and literary critic early in his career, he is the author of several acclaimed
books on education issues, including Cultural Literacy (
Vintage, 1988), The
Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them (Anchor 1999), The Knowledge Deficit (Houghton Mifflin Harourt 2006), and The Making of Americans (Yale University Press 2010).
Designer Bill Bensley fashioned the place as an imaginary French - colonial campus, right down to T - shirts emblazoned with the fictional
school's name;
vintage luggage,
books, and other memorabilia decorate the lobby and public spaces.
Scrapbook paper, maps, comic
books, pages from
books, fabric scraps, ephemera, kids
school papers, kids artwork, drawings, sketches, letters, menus, playbills, wrapping paper,
vintage sheet music, food labels, magazines, wallpaper, contact paper — use whatever you like to breath new life into furniture, to cover walls, create personalized artwork, basically to reinvent anything!