Le Rossignol’s valve

The political scientist Wallace Sayre once explained why academic politics are so vicious. ‘Because the stakes are so low,’ he snarked. Some academic feuds start with an author list. Should one include the former supervisor of the young academic who did the calculations using his ex-boss’s code? What about senior professor whose instrument was used to collect some of the data? And then there’s the name order. Who goes first? Last? Should it be alphabetical? Contrary to Sayre’s maxim, for a young academic the stakes could not be higher.