[gruseom]

But the thing Higham remembered was orders of magnitude more significant than thing I was talking about, which was genuinely trivial.

Still, I take your point that among true star professors this kind of brilliant decency isn't as uncommon as I made out. I was using the term "star professor" a little more ironically than that.

I definitely disagree with what you said about most academics, though!

[startingup]

My research advisor was a star professor in a big name school. Also very arrogant. He considered me one of his best students (so no personal axe to grind), but I was turned off by his arrogance. Moral of the story: you can't generalize!

[gruseom]

While I agree about the perils of generalization, the problem in this case is not that - it's that we're using the term "star professor" ambiguously. My fault for not being clearer in the first place.

[rms]

Maybe your item of trivia wasn't trivial to Chomsky... that's actually a pretty cool find and I'm sure he found it very interesting.