Laws of the academic jungle Times Higher Education
It was Wallace Stanley Sayre, a political scientist at Columbia University, who reportedly came up with the most famous law of academic politics: the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.
Anyone involved in sorting out university car-parking will recognise the law’s truth.
Now Sir David Watson, professor of higher education management at the Institute of Education and winner of Times Higher Education’s 2009 Lord Dearing Lifetime Achievement Award, has condensed his observations of the sector into nine rules of his own.
Watson’s “Laws of Academic Life” are:
* Academics grow in confidence the farther away they are from their true fields of expertise (what you really know about is provisional and ambiguous, what other people do is clear-cut and usually wrong)
* You should never go to a school or department for anything that is in its title (which university consults its architecture department on the estate, or – heaven forbid – its business school on the budget?)
