{"id":2832,"date":"2008-01-12T14:54:06","date_gmt":"2008-01-12T22:54:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/2008\/01\/12\/14\/54\/low-stakes\/"},"modified":"2008-01-12T14:54:06","modified_gmt":"2008-01-12T22:54:06","slug":"low-stakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/2008\/01\/12\/14\/54\/low-stakes\/","title":{"rendered":"Low Stakes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Finally a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0312340044\/ref=nosim\/meehawl-20\" target=\"_blank\">source<\/a> for <a href=\"http:\/\/ask.metafilter.com\/80812\/Academic-politics-are-vicious-because-the-stakes-are-so-low\" target=\"_blank\">the idea that academic politics are so cruel\/brutal\/intense\/vicious because the stakes are so low<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0312340044\/ref=nosim\/meehawl-20\">Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.&#8221; This observation is routinely attributed to former Harvard professor Henry Kissinger. Well before Kissinger got credit for that thought in the mid-1970s, however, Harvard political scientist Richard Neustadt told a reporter, &#8220;Academic politics is much more vicious than real politics. We think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because the stakes are so small.&#8221; Others believe this quip originated with political scientist Wallace Sayre, Neustadt\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s onetime colleague at Columbia University. A 1973 book gave as &#8220;Sayre\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Law,&#8221; &#8220;In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthat is why academic politics are so bitter.&#8221; Sayre\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s colleague and coauthor Herbert Kaufman said his usual wording was &#8220;The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low.&#8221; In his 1979 book Peter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s People, Laurence Peter wrote, &#8220;Competition in academia is so vicious because the stakes are so small.&#8221; He called this &#8220;Peter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Theory of Entrepreneurial Aggressiveness in Higher Education.&#8221; Variations on that thought have also been attributed to scientist-author C. P. Snow, professor-politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and politician Jesse Unruh (among others). According to the onetime editor of Woodrow Wilson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s papers, however, long before any of them strode the academic-political scene, Wilson observed often that the intensity of academic squabbles he witnessed while president of Princeton University was a function of the &#8220;triviality&#8221; of the issues being considered.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Finally a source for the idea that academic politics are so cruel\/brutal\/intense\/vicious because the stakes are so low: Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.&#8221; This observation is routinely&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[459,465,466,470,460,463,467,464,469,461,462,468],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-c-p-snow","category-daniel-patrick-moynihan","category-harvard-university","category-henry-kissinger","category-herbert-kaufman","category-jesse-unruh","category-laurence-peter","category-princeton-university","category-richard-neustadt","category-wallace-sayre","category-woodrow-wilson"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2832\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}