Let's hear it for Tyche

via Wikimedia Commons

Tyche, a goddess whose name can mean "happenstance" or "chance," ruled over the destinies of Greek cities. (Her Roman name is Fortuna, but it sounds so much better, because it is less familiar, in Greek.) Her crown, the one worn by the statue at right, represents a city's walls. The Greeks attributed to her all events in a city's history that had no rational explanation: floods, fires and, one hopes, some positive occurrences as well.

Something I find most instructive about the ancient world is how much harsher it was than our own. How much more random, even how much more boring. In the face of terrible disasters with no safety net, the Greeks were comforted by worshipping at the altar of randomness personified.

Reading some of the posts about the academic job market over at College Misery (oh, the memories!) started me thinking about Tyche vs. our straightjacketing sense of personal responsibility. As young academics, we are told that we are natural scholars and will be wonderful teachers. Then we encounter the job market, in which the odds are overwhelmingly against finding a good job. Rather than admitting this, our advisers and many advice books imply that changing some small detail about our applications or publications will of course change our luck. And what's more, we should have thought of this before and basically have no one but ourselves to blame that we have to spend another year on the market.

This is insane. We need to get with the idea that there are things outside our power. Including some of the more random comments on student evaluations. Including whether the topic of a junior scholar's handful of publications fits the handful of tenure track jobs available in his or her field. The Greeks knew it wasn't all up to them.

Let's hear it for Tyche, a divinity whose time has come. Pin It