As a devoted fan of international hockey, and already nursing my wounds from Arsenal’s previous night’s loss to Bayern in the Champions League, last Thursday afternoon I found myself pausing from time to time in order to check the score in the Olympic gold-medal game between the Canadian and American women’s teams. It certainly didn’t augur well when Canada was down 2-0 with only a few minutes left, so you can imagine my surprise when I next checked and discovered that the two teams were deadlocked at 2-2, and playing in sudden-death overtime. And yes, at that point I did stop what I was doing in order to watch. What an amazing game, and in the end it was a shame that someone had to lose … and but for the final 55 seconds of regulation time, not to mention an assist from an exceptionally friendly goal post, it would have been the Canadian women appearing so crestfallen at receiving the silver medals.
Academic life is so very different. Yes, there are certainly highs and lows, but I don’t think there is anything comparable to the ecstasy of winning or the despair of losing that characterizes major sporting events … and while there is plenty of stress, there is nothing at all equivalent to the pressure that comes from knowing that you have less than a single minute in which to effect some substantive change. For most of us the biggest career challenge is obtaining tenure, an endurance contest played out over some five or six years. And there is no similar sense of “winners” and “losers”. Can you imagine, for a moment, an academic version of the Olympic games? Perhaps one event might involve having to write a paper in 60 minutes on a topic that you are given only at the beginning of the hour. Or conferences in which body-checking is permitted! I can envisage a complete revamping of the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Of course I jest. But there is something that all of us can learn from the example of our women’s Olympic hockey team. Perhaps two things, in fact. The first is that we should never ever abandon hope, no matter how bleak the situation may appear. The academic world is certainly not the entrance to Dante’s Inferno, although occasionally one can perhaps be forgiven for seeing certain similarities. And the second is that no one else is going to change our game for us; we have to take the responsibility for doing so ourselves.
Success can seem so close, but in the end so elusive. As was so often the case, Yogi Berra said it best.