From the book:
Ignoring the all-powerful administration staff (i.e., secretaries), the ECE Department is made of small subject-area research-related groups. The type of courses a professor is willing to teach is implied by his or her research group. The groups mostly match the “themes” described in Section 3.1, although those are often an aggregate of smaller groups. Most professors see their group are logically independent from others since the scope of their research is so different. The Department is simply an administrative construct above that. Politics is everything. The groups are generally friendly, but on the administrative level there is a complicated web of personality conflicts four years of research have only begun to uncover. It is best to assume any given professor is in a less-than-amicable-but-professional relationship with any other any other. Hopefully, it can be assumed that professors who are married to each other have a better relationship. Yes, ECE professors do intermarry. Yes, it is possible that they teach their children Fourier transforms at age 8, but it is best not to know. Also note that even if students find a certain professor universally disliked, that says nothing about how his peers feel about him. Avoid saying anything that will cause you to taste the strong flavour of foot.