Twenty-five years at the helm of the National Association of Scholars have left me with vivid memories: of knocks and bruises, peaks of exhilaration and, especially, unforgettable characters—the geniuses and fools, saints and sinners, eccentrics, lovable and otherwise, who populate academe’s teeming menagerie. But as for lessons learned, that’s a very different story. As with all action sports—and academic reform is definitely one of them—learning tends to be of the “process” kind, subliminally muscular, of bob, weave, duck and grasp, and therefore resistant to easy articulation. Still, a quarter-century in the NAS’s vineyard hasn’t been wholly without some yield in communicable wisdom, so allow me a moment to squeeze out a few of the hard-wrung drops.
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Although academics, on average, have higher IQs than their fellow citizens, and far eclipse them in mastery of the accumulated understandings
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