Wednesday 1st August 2012 - What sport, music and education have in common

I will start with what to many people is a terrible confession - that I am not really interested in sport.  I have never attended a professional football match in my life, nor (as far as I can remember) watched a whole game on television.  As a teenager I was a keen supporter of a county cricket team (but not the county I lived in - it was just that it was easier to get to a neighbouring county's ground) but I have lost touch with the game.  I think the last time I paid to attend a sporting function was in 1991 when the World Student Games were in Sheffield and I went along to both the diving and the athletics.  But I watched the Olympic opening ceremony and have seen flashes of particular events in news broadcasts over the last few days.

I am not by instinct a competitive person, and I take no delight in what I perceive as nationalistic commentaries that focus only on British copmpetitors to the exclusion of comment on any other. (I find BBC's Look North, with its emphasis on what Yorkshire athletes are doing, particularly odd: it seems as if they regard Yorkshire as another competing country.)

But I am an internationalist, and one of the great elements of the games is that they bring together people from around the world.  Press shots of athletes from different countries enjoying each others' company; television clips of competitors at the end of a race embracing and congratulating each other (apparently sincerely); pictures of supporters waving different flags but engaged in good-hearted banter - these are things that I find particularly moving.

Higher education, at its best, is another way in which people from very different countries and cultures can be brought together - and in a predominantly non-competitive spirit.  I have blogged before about how moved I am on my visits to our International Faculty in Thessaloniki to see how students from recently-warring parts of the Balkans are brought together to study for their degrees, and how they then form friendships and get to understand different points of view.

So in some ways the Olympics and universities are rather similar.  And there's been another example of that 'coming together' over the last couple of weeks - the performance at the Prom Concerts in London of the complete Beethoven symphony cycle by the East-West Divan Orchestra, created by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said.  That orchestra consists of Israeli musicians playing alongside Arab colleagues from various parts of the Middle East.  Sport, education, music - three ways in which the world can seem smaller by bringing people from different backgrounds together.  Except that there is less nationalistic competition in education and in music - and possibly less suspicion of doping too.