I remembered those words today, and it struck me how naively childish they were. As a schoolboy, I thought that the school principal should be smarter than any other teacher; that a university professor should be smarter than a school teacher; that a full professor should be smarter than an associate professor, who in turn should be smarter than a PhD student. And a member of the academy of sciences should be even smarter than a university professor.
A neat hierarchy according to smarts.
Of course it doesn't work like that.
