French mathematician André Weil once mentioned an unconsciousformula
that weaker academic departments used when hiring new faculty.
Hetold a fellow mathematician, Paul Halmos, about it and Halmos
included Weil'slaw in his autobiography. Here is what Halmos says:
"But what do you do when a department [in a university] goes bad? André Weil suggested that there is a logarithmic law at work: first-rate people attract other first-rate people, but second-rate people tend to hire third-raters, and third-rate people hire fifth-raters. If a dean or a president is genuinely interested in building and maintaining a high-quality university (and some of them are), then he must not grant complete self-determination to a second-rate department; he must, instead, use his administrative powers to intervene and set things right. That's one of the proper functions of deans and presidents, and pity the poor university in which a large proportion of both the faculty and the administration are second-raters; it is doomed to diverge to minus infinity." (p. 123)
From I Want to Be a Mathematician: An Automathography,
by Paul Halmos,Springer-Verlag, New York, 1984.
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