"'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."
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Paul Halmos
Paul Richard Halmos (Hungarian: Halmos Pál) (March 3, 1916 – October 2, 2006) was a Hungarian-born Jewish American mathematician who made fundamental advances in the areas of probability theory, statistics, operator theory, ergodic theory, functional analysis (in particular, Hilbert spaces), and mathematical logic.
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