Someone once said that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low. The quote, under various forms, is routinely attributed to former Harvard professor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, but others have said it is also due to Wallace Sayre, a former Columbia professor (see in particular the Wikipedia page for Sayre's Law.) According to Wikipedia, similar statements have been repeated by various people over the years, from Woodrow Wilson to Laurence Peter to Richard Neustadt, which suggests the quote struck a chord with many. (Still according to Wikipedia, Kissinger couldn't help but add in a speech in 1997: "And I promise you at Harvard, [the fights] are passionately intense and the subjects are extremely unimportant.")
In its May 28th edition, The Economist provides another example of Sayre's Law, which is stated on the Wikipedia page as (in a formulation attributed to Charles Issawi): "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue... That is why academic politics are so bitter." The article, entitled "Natural selection - academic squabbles really are the bitterest", describes the infighting for "Oxford University’s professorial seat in poetry, paying just £6,901 ($11,000) a year" but offering a lot of prestige. It is quite enlightening - I'll let you read for yourselves because it is hard to give a good account of the squabbles without quoting the whole article. The best part is at the end - "This year, out of more than 4,000 academic staff and 150,000 graduates, only 477 people bothered to vote." Such a big fight for such a small audience.
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