Intellectually brilliant academics can be unable to train successors

Evidence

Muhsin Mahdi, a later professor of Arabic at Harvard, remembers Gibb listening to Grunebaum talking in a committee and then saying something along the lines of ‘You know, this is like a steel ball, what you said. There is no way to get inside at all. There is no way to open it and see its internal structure. And if you let it fall, it will hurt your feet. So you have to handle it with care.’ Grunebaum was a sociable academic who was active in setting up conferences and founding MESA (Middle East Studies Association), but he left no school of disciples. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 441

Categorization

• XREF: The steel-ball metaphor recalls how Grunebaum’s closed-system view parallels the enclosed, un-penetrable model of Islam he himself described. — connects to: Mass-level genius cannot substitute for specific local knowledge — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 2064