Instead of going to college I spent my time out on the road learning how to be a better musician.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college to a school of higher learning.

Year after year President Bush has broken his campaign promises on college aid. And year after year the Republican leadership in Congress has let him do it.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience and has little to do with school or college.

I have an incredible amount of basketball knowledge and I think a lot of that is derived from having a Hall of Fame college basketball coach who was very knowledgeable of the game and I had a great high school coach who was also very knowledgeable.

You go to college not only for the latest knowledge but also to meet people from different backgrounds. That's the genius of the American higher-education system compared with the Europeans'. We don't simply skim the elite.

Almost every college playwright or sketch or improv comedian was sort of aware of Christopher Durang - even kids in high school. His short plays were so accessible to younger people and I think that was inspirational to me.

The openness of rural Nebraska certainly influenced me. That openness in a way fosters the imagination. But growing up Lincoln wasn't a small town. It was a college town. It had record stores and was a liberal place.

However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

I often have said that to be a college president you need a thick skin a good sense of humor and nerves like sewer pipes.

When I was at college I worked in a department store called Brit Home Stores which is a pretty lackluster department store selling clothes for middle-aged women. My job was to walk the floor and find anything that was damaged take it to the store room and log it.

When I came home for the summer after my first year of college I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud - 2 000 miles in a what? Well my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?

The only other time I've been away from home was when I went to college. And that was just an hour away so I could always go home if I needed to.

Most of the time I liked school and got good grades. In junior high though I hit a stumbling block with math - I used to come home and cry because of how frustrated I was! But after a few good teachers and a lot of perseverance I ended up loving math and even choosing it as a major when I got to college.

I stand before you as the governor of Texas but also stand before you the son of two tenant farmers. Ray Perry who came home after 35 bombing missions over Europe to work his little corner of land out there and Amelia who made sure that my sister Milla and I had everything that we needed included hand sewing my clothes until I went off to college.

In high school a teacher once suggested that I be a math major in college. I thought 'Me? You've got to be joking!' I mean in junior high I used to come home and cry because I was so afraid of my math homework. Seriously I was terrified of math.

Right around the end of the fifties college students and young people in general began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.