Years ago, a professor that I disliked because he had a tendency to hush the women and allow the men to expound even when they did verbal fishtails and even confused themselves, told me I just wasn’t that bright and I did not belong in graduate school. Now when somebody tells me I am an idiot, I cheerfully agree and ask them to teach me.
But it came at a time of intense personal and intellectual flux and insecurity. I came from a small school of no significance attended primary by locals. We played soccer either with the profs, drank beer with them, a few profs even taught informal seminars just for the hell of it. I had one friend who was an intellectual star and went on to be a successful corporate lawyer. The rest of us were merely curious goofballs and it was encouraged. However, being a curious goofball turned out to be a deadly downfall in graduate school.
I lacked intellectual rigor you see, I had arrived and found out taking class X was impossible if I had not already read A, B, and C. So, I panicked. I dropped a class, added another, switched my areas of concentration for my comp exams was told I would fail
because the reading list was too extensive and lured a few others into a study group for the purposes of mutually assured survival. I plowed through my degree like a chastened farm animal.
My curiosity evaporated.
