Well, I’m not sure I’ve seen that pattern quite so much, but if you’re seeing it, I would speculate survivor bias. The people who stay around are the ones who were good enough at the game to stay around.
the way i’ve generally understood the use of the word “vicious” in this context is in judging other academics’ work quality. which is also typically where i think most people from the outside perceive the stakes to be low: as in who cares whether one more journal article that no one will read gets published? but from the inside it can mean the difference between tenure and no tenure (for the young academic vying for it), respect and abject failure, money or no money.
Well sure but in this case the actual word was “viscous”, not “vicious”. Academic politics is thick, sticky, and insufficiently fluid and insufficiently solid at the same time. Okay it was probably a typo but it kind of works as an analogy.
sure, maybe it was intended as a novel coinage, but i assumed the “vicious” interpretation which is the more common one since the comment explicitly references Sayre's Law.
