But still. That doesn’t explain why David chose to respect me. I had no prestige in that department, no grants, no committee appointments, no budget of my own. I had nothing to offer him but that which I’d learned. I was basically a nobody at Penn—a nobody who could at times be sharp with people. But maybe that was the point. Maybe in that early, untactful moment when I told him his work was “shit,” he’d glimpsed something important: I would tell him the truth. If I complimented him, it had nothing to do with who his father had been. If I respected him, it was because he’d earned my respect.
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