In comments to my post about quit-lit and the impossibility of responding to many pieces these days, thm left a comment (yes, people still do that…) making an analogy that had never occurred to me: in a sense, academics are like athletes or musicians:

What I’ve been thinking about recently is the extent to which we should consider physics, or history, or any academic discipline, to be akin to areas widely acknowledged to be the domain of expert performance, such as athletics or music. Things where success usually involves a huge chunk of one’s youth, in an obsessive, immersive environment. Where there are more with aspirations than there are jobs. And where there’s a distribution of talent that spans orders of magnitude from the most talented and famous to vanishingly nothing for those who haven’t studied.

That hadn’t occurred to me, but there are some things I really like about it. And I especially liked the point about sympathy:

As a society, we have do have some sympathy for, say, the minor league ballplayer who never makes it to the majors, or the cellist who never gets a job in an orchestra. But it’s limited sympathy, because everyone knows the odds.

A big categorical difference between academics and athletics or music is that the moment of reckoning comes about a decade later in life.

To some extent, this analogy hinges on how well you think “everyone knows the odds” applies to a scholarly career. “Nobody told me the odds” is central to a lot of complaints about academia, particularly in quit-lit, and that’s probably the weakest point. Then again, anyone who follows sports at all undoubtedly knows several examples of athletes who had talent and knew they’d make it to the big time only to be derailed along the way by injury, or personal demons of one sort or another. So while academics might not be as fully aware of the risks as they should be, I’m not sure athletes are all that much better informed.

I like the point about the timing, as well, for athletics, at least. It’s not all that hard to come up with examples of people who stuck with the pursuit of a musical career for years longer than they should’ve. Those are interesting cases, because in popular culture at least, there’s a sort of perverse admiration for a lot of those people and their stubborn refusal to let go of their dreams.

Of course, that then carries over into a lot of the arts– we celebrate the struggle of people in creative endeavours in a way that’s frequently problematic. I follow a lot of writers on Twitter, and the nobility of the suffering Artist is a trope that gets smacked down about once a month on average. I suspect there’s a bit of a similar dynamic at work in a lot of academia, and maybe that’s an analogy worth pursuing.

(There’s also probably something to explore in the analogy to art in terms of the original piece that prompted this, in terms of the value attached to the end product. Is most scholarly production best thought of in science-like terms, where each work is a step in a cumulative process of constructing knowledge, or art-like terms, where any individual piece may be beautiful but few if any are truly essential?)

I’m also a little uncomfortable, as always, with the invocation of talent in this. That is, it risks playing into the myth that those who succeed have some special innate qualities that ensure their success. This underplays the role of hard work, discipline, and luck in “making it” in whatever field. Again, as a college basketball fan, I’ve seen countless examples of players who had talent enough to re-write the collegiate record books, who never made any impact in the pros for one reason or another.

Which, of course circles around to another thing that’s frequently problematic, namely telling junior academics to “just keep working hard.” This regularly gets slammed in academic Twitter, almost as regularly as the “suffer for your Art” thing on writer Twitter. That’s occasionally unfair– I think it’s often misreading something that is, in fact, the only practical advice you can give– but then we’re back to the “it’s impossible to respond to this” problem.

Anyway, a good comment, and one that provided some interesting angles to think about. So it’s worth giving whatever dubious signal boost I can by promoting it to a top-level post on a blog that nobody reads…