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Just feeding off of drama. Over what, exactly? This is equivalent to posting about a Wikipedia edit war.

Why are university politics so vicious? Because the stakes are so low.

Don't you think that the whole "tenure track", "up or out" thing has a lot to do with it as well? The academic job search is quite brutal.

(Even further off-topic: my old university has decided that each group can have at most one professor, and that this job will be re-awarded every five years. It's too early to see the effects, but...)

I think the original version of the quote was referring to student politics.

I don't think so - it's attributed to various academics, most famously Henry Kissinger; why would they talk about student politics? (That said, I didn't manage to find an authoritative source for the quote.)

Nope it was about academic politics: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayres_Law

I think that you might be on to something. There are some disciplines that are much less competitive for jobs/tenure (like accounting). From the outside at least, it sure seems like there is a lot less internal politicking going on.

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