Tenured people carry it out, but in my experience, the goal tends to be for their students/subordinates/group colleagues/etc. to achieve tenure instead of others.

I've heard of an engineering faculty where there was basically a cold war between a few of the tenured profs. They would do everything they could to undercut or screw each other over. Pure spite-based politics. Toxic as hell and there was very little anyone could do about out.

i know of prestigious departments where after literally decades of political stalemate with colleagues (over things as petty as who gets what office) prestigious faculty finally managed to finagle a high-dollar offer from a lower tier institution and de-camped over the politics.

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.

There are so many more ways than that to starve and sabotage a burgeoning researcher, ensuring they never take root.

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.

You probably mean "vicious" but "viscous" works too, funnily. Username checks out.

I was also wondering if it was a spelling mistake, a failure to know the difference between the two words, a legit description of academic politics as molasses-like, or a play on the user's own username. The layers of potential irony here are thick and viscous!

fair point - though it sometimes turns into a fight about how to remove others’ tenure; which is their most prized and valuable possession.