Olympic excellence in universities can break glass ceilings
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
As luck and my awesome ability to push deadlines to the limit would have it, I wrote this column at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver during the short-track speed skating finals of the Winter Olympics. (Sixteen bucks for a Diet Coke and two slices of pizza, I’ll have you know).
The Olympics were amazing. They really should do it every four years. But as you’ll recall, there was a lot of controversy over the whole thing. The weather, the cancelled tickets, the malfunctioning flame and the lack of French at the Opening Ceremonies, the rowdy crowd that forced an outdoor concert to be cancelled because of injuries. It was a rocky couple of weeks there. But at the heart of the controversy was the “Own the Podium” program, a half-decade campaign to fund and train Canadian athletes into a position where they could dominate the competition in sport after sport.
What seemed to surprise a lot of observers wasn’t Own the Podium’s success or failure but the mere fact of its existence: A concerted attempt by Canadians to win everything there was to win. This struck people as funny somehow. OK, it’s obvious why it struck some people as funny. We’re said to be polite, and polite people are not normally cutthroat competitors. The headline on Slate’s story about Own The Podium was classic: “Might It Possibly Be OK if We Kick Some Ass?”
The trick, of course, is to be competitive without being a jerk. The best usually manage it, because of course, thumping your chest and badmouthing the competition doesn’t make you the best. One of the many blessings of high level athletic competition is that it is obvious to everyone (well, in most events) who won and who was all talk. These things are measurable down to the hundredth of a second. At such moments, the backgrounds of the competitors, where they’re from, who’s rich or poor — all of that melts away. The only question that matters is whether you have ability and ambition.
A lot of people get through their lives without finding themselves in any kind of place like that — a place where you have to deliver in a domain where success is measurable and the standards are immutable. But one place you run into that sort of test all the time is a university. Not just in varsity sports, although of course that’s always been a prime crossroads of pressure and opportunity. Just ask Marnie McBean, who was rowing for Western when I was there and went on to become one of Canada’s most decorated Olympians.
But high stakes and limitless possibility are also part of the life of academic researchers, who compete with peers around the world for grants and for space in the top journals. You learn early in physics or chemistry that the whole history of knowledge is the ground you have to perform on, and the most that’s ever been known is only a prelude to your own contribution, if you have one to offer. Business students know they won’t get special favours for being somebody’s hometown favourite when they make their move in a competitive business environment.
Even in poli-sci, my own field, we soon found ourselves imagining careers at the highest level of public service (or, in my own case, a career making fun of the highest levels of public service). Most of us were from small towns around southern Ontario. Taking on the world wasn’t a native-born or homegrown instinct. We picked it up, from our profs, our surroundings, and one another while at Western.
In so many fields, you learn at university that the only way to excel is to be excellent. That sort of talk probably strikes some people as elitist. But to me it’s always been tremendously democratic and egalitarian, because your social background and your connections don’t matter in these tests as much as your wit and your will.
No better tool for shattering glass ceilings than a good university education has yet been devised. That’s worth keeping in mind as governments head into a period of austerity to help dig out of the deficit spending that returned during the 2009 recession. There’ll be pressure on anything governments do, except for two sacred cows. Governments will be terrified of cutting health care and they’ll be even more terrified of raising taxes. Everything else, including university funding, will be considered for cuts.
And when university funding comes up, it won’t be hard to find voices saying this is fancy-pants stuff that only a few eggheads care about. Better to spend on the essentials and cut this frippery.
But in a democracy, spreading opportunity regardless of background is essential. When somebody says we can’t afford our universities, what they’re saying is that there’s a ceiling over the head of the next door neighbour’s kid — that that kid, and every other kid in town can get only so far in life and no further — and that they’re fine with that. That’s the truly elitist talk, because it ensures that the only way to get ahead is to be born ahead.
Follow Paul Wells online at www.macleans.ca/inklesswells
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