What's it all about? The winner of the THE Lord Dearing Lifetime Achievement Award has distilled ten facts of university life to share 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)
What's it all about? The winner of the THE Lord Dearing Lifetime Achievement Award has distilled ten facts of university life to share
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)
This effect is also known in the world of sailboat racing. A well-equipped racing yacht or dinghy has innumerable adjustments that can be made to the sail controls, the centerboard, and the operating method. Some adjustments are well known, while others cause interminable debate. The observation is that there is no argument about the ones that everybody knows work, so the argumentation is about things that can't be clearly shown to be beneficial. The conclusion is that they probably don't make any difference.
So the arguments get more and more energetic as you get further into areas where nobody actually knows anything. Which goes a long way towards explaining why religious wars are the worst.
He was quite convinced that had the hotel not been emptying the next morning they would still be there now. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
