Questions for our president

Who's your favorite NYU celebrity? I would say [NYU law professor] Anna Deavere Smith. My wife was one of her first funders. I saw her first play "Fires in the Mirror" out in Brooklyn, sitting right behind the people she was playing on stage.

What was the last movie you saw in theaters? You know, I don't know that I've gone to a movie theater since Lisa [Sexton's wife] died. We always went to the movies together on Thanksgiving Day. After Thanksgiving and on Christmas Day. And we are a DVD family. ... I'm still working through her Netflix.

What is your favorite NYU dining hall? My favorite NYU dining hall is the place in Kimmel. You get the great sandwiches, and I love to sit out on the terrace.

What's your favorite place on campus? I get a very, very special feeling every time I walk into the law school because it's what brought me to NYU.

What is the one thing you would want every NYU student to experience before they graduate? [pause] Joy. Just the joy of learning. I'd want them to have one, one moment where they understood learning, and understood just the joy of seeing complex community working.

If you were going to take a class at NYU, which one would you take and why? If I were choosing a course for me, as a young person, and not simply because of me but because of the material, it would be my first semester freshman seminar on the Supreme Court and religion because it just does it all for entering freshmen.

In August, The New York Times quoted Sexton saying that to show his staff his commitment to controlling the university's budget, he was going to control himself by losing at least 30 pounds. We asked Sexton to elaborate on that story. [On] June 2, I went into a deans' meeting. My kids say I have to do things sacramentally. And June 2 was the day on which I came, in 1976, as close as I could to telling Lisa I loved her — which was to say I would write to her over the summer. We had just finished our first year in law school. She was going to Chicago. We were married two months later. It was the same with weight loss. So on June 2, we had a dean's meeting, and I said look, you know, it's clear I'm going to be asking all of you to control the budget. I told them the story about 1989, and I said I will have lost 30 pounds by the time we get back on Sept. 2.

What's your one secret for dropping the weight? I think it must be the metabolism and the schedule I keep because I don't exercise, except for the basketball games, when I play basketball or racquetball.

What's the best book you've read in the last five years? A great book I read, which is relevant to some of the things here, is a book by a man named Richard Florida, which is called "Who's Your City? [: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where You Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life]."

What coffee do you drink, or do you make your own? Here in the office we use Green Mountain. It's American pluralism. There's like 50 coffees in there and people pick. ... By the time I get [to work, often before 8 a.m.] I've had a pot of coffee. Sometime around lunch I switch to diet Pepsi.