Bon mots: the truth about college teaching?

I generally don't enjoy reading curmudgeonly conservative essayists, but this quote from Joseph Epstein's recent In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage tickled me:

Having not long ago closed down a university teaching career of thirty years [at Northwestern Univ.], I would like to go on record as saying that I wouldn't have done it for a penny less. Teaching is arduous work, entailing much grinding detail and boring repetition, interrupted only occasionally by moments of always surprising exultation. And I should like to add that I don't think I learned a thing from my students. God love 'em.

Thanks to Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.