>The best scientists don't make good managers
This brings up an important point. People are good at different tasks.
Some people are exceptional with gleaning and regurgitating information from texts and lectures. This is what we mostly label as "smart" today.
Others can be great at different things, such as any of the vast sets of social skills, critical thinking, maths, strategy, etc.
The problem is that while intelligence in one skill is correlated with intelligence in another, it is not necessarily the case.
We probably all have met engineers who openly admit they're not the greatest writers. Another example was one I learned from my interest in chess. Bobby Fischer was one of the greatest at the game, but notoriously struggled with memorizing opening game lines and theory. I am sure many of us here have also met engineers and academics with a lot of knowledge in their field, but whom also hold missconceptions, or easily come to factually erroneous conclusions on things which they have not studies.
When I read the story, I was a bit incredulous at the author's words that "IQ is real and it does matter," not because it's such an obvious over-simplification.
However, universities will be reluctant to disavow their beliefs in the mystical IQ--an idea which rests in the scholarly literature as an estimation of G, general intelligence--as this is a set of institutions which benefits from their faith not just that it is something which can be measured on a test, but that they do accurately measure it.
They're running in circles with this "medium brilliance" because they're out of ideas about why their faith's predictions failed. Turns out those who score the best on IQ tests are those who are the best at scoring well on IQ tests--not the same set of skills needed to be the best scientists.