Night Thoughts

… the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. 

I came to the University of Hyderabad on the 1st of June 2011. Today, particularly,  it is almost impossible to not reflect on the year gone by and think of the roads taken…

My one persistent sense of the year past is that things have moved rather slowly, and that time has flowed in different ways. Tempo Larghetto – somewhere between Adagio and Lento, rather than Allegro!  Time has flowed rather differently this past year,  not quite backwards, but many things seemed to take more time than I had originally thought they might. So instead of a stocktaking this is really more a time to think of what could or should have been. And what still needs doing, follow through, and follow up. Frost comes to mind again, what with those lonely, dark, and deep woods. And the miles to go.

The title of the post, lest it be misunderstood, are really more the Night Thoughts of a Novitiate Vice Chancellor,  along the lines of Night-Thoughts of a Classical Physicist (the novel by Russell McCormmach, but that has more of a sense of angst than I feel) or the poem by Edward Young, from which they both take their name, although that has even more angst than that…

At the end of a year, the view that I have of our University is in many ways not very different from the one that I started with- we are indeed a University with the Potential for Excellence- except that we are now beyond the stage of having our potential recognized, the potential has to be translated into a realization on so many fronts. Some of the Ten Simple Rules (for surviving in a harsh environment) that I wrote about last are germane, most of all the need for endurance. The race here is not to the swift, it is to the true… and to those who stay the course.