Somewhere in my graduate school years I noticed a trend.
An undergraduate philosophy major will sound absolutely brilliant. They often speak in a jargon-dense diction, delivered at high velocity, one idea bouncing off another to produce a spiderweb of spiraling associations. The effect, rhetorically and aesthetically, is often overwhelming. Logic doesn’t really play a role because one hardly knows what they are saying. The unwitting listener feels himself outmatched, drowned and blinded by the naked light of unbridled genius.
The graduate student is a much dimmer light. He is still full of abstract phrases and obscure references, but he is someone who is starting to sound, again, like a human being — explaining things, pausing, asking questions to ensure the listener is following. This is not nearly as impressive as the undergraduate, but it does have the virtue of allowing the ordinary among us to understand what is being said.
The professor sounds like your basic “dad,” albeit one with a lot to say. He can at times seem unsure of himself. He pauses to define his terms and to add qualifications to his statements. He speaks carefully. He might even speak slowly. He explains as he goes, almost apologizing for whatever obscurities he falls into. His manner of speech is, well… designed to communicate! A quite boring and not evidently bright fellow, you almost feel embarrassed for him.
In light of these observations, I was forced to conclude that there is either something terribly wrong with our educational system — since the higher people go the dumber, they get — or intelligence is not quite what we sometimes think it is.
Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman could teach physics to a hamster.
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