In any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.
Sayre’s law is named after Wallace Stanley Sayre (1905–1972), a U.S. political scientist and professor at Columbia University. It relates to the personalised nature of academic politics, asserting that the intensity of academic squabbles was a function of the triviality”of the issue at hand. By way of corollary, it adds: “That is why academic politics are so bitter.”