I learned something

I always like picking up a new bit of information. On a discussion about academic meetings on ITFF (one poor poster related that the ones in her department are so acrimonious, that one of her colleagues takes Xanax for several days before the meeting just to be able to handle it), another poster quoted the law I often quote, about academic politics being so petty because the stakes are so small.

She cited Wikipedia - which is, after all, reliable for some things:

Sayre’s Law states, in a formulation quoted by Charles Philip Issawi: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.” By way of corollary, it adds: “That is why academic politics are so bitter.” Sayre’s law is named after Wallace Stanley Sayre (1905-1972), U.S. political scientist and professor at Columbia University.

So it's "Sayre's Law" that says that low-stakes fights are likely to be the ugly ones. Interesting.