Excellence is in the air here at the University. Interested in applying for a Fulbright? Stop by the Center for Undergraduate Excellence. Or if you're an employee looking to upgrade your skills you can call on the Center for Leadership Excellence. What was once the Teaching Resource Center has lately relaunched itself as the Center for Teaching Excellence. The University's new financial aid structure is the “Affordable Excellence” plan. Don't need financial aid? Maybe you'd like to donate to the President's Fund for Excellence, which finances "retention of key faculty members... offered positions at competing universities." (Apparently excellence alone is not a big enough draw.)
And then there's the Center for Organizational Excellence, or COE. It's a little hard to say exactly what this center does. According to Executive Vice President Pat Hogan it's intended to "leverage our core strengths and distinctions and meet the goals of our strategic plan." According to its own "Strategy Map," its mission is to "create a culture of excellence to enable core mission and strategic priorities." Whatever that means, it's obviously important. So important, in fact, that the College recently emailed all its faculty and staff members to urge them to attend the COE's December "showcase" event, where they will be lectured by a newly-hired assistant basketball coach on the topic of — you guessed it — excellence.
What's behind this explosion of excellence? My wife is a trademark attorney, and a while back she introduced me to a legal term for which I've since found many other uses: "mere puffery." If you say your breakfast cereal cures cancer, you'll likely get brought up for false advertising (indeed, that may be the least of your problems). But if you announce that it's "the #1 cereal among kids the world over," that's mere puffery and the law can't touch you.
It's tempting to dismiss all the "excellence" talk as mere puffery. Administrators, or their highly paid consultants, have decided that "excellence" is the word that opens alumni checkbooks, and so we should sprinkle it liberally over everything. Having taught some alumni back when they were students, I am skeptical that they are so easily swayed by empty buzzwords. But who am I to argue with highly paid consultants?
The cult of "excellence" can turn dangerous, though, when its high priests start to believe in it themselves — when it turns into a kind of “cargo cult.”
During World War II airplanes came to Melanesia, bringing cargo: canned goods, medicine and other nice things. Then the war ended and the planes stopped coming. So the Melanesians got busy. They laid out airstrips, waved landing signals, carved radio headphones out of wood. Surely that would bring the airplanes back? In the process, they squandered effort and resources that could have been put to better use.
And I worry something similar is happening at the University: that our obsession with the idea of "excellence" is hindering us from achieving the real thing. The COE houses an associate vice president for organizational excellence, a director of organizational excellence and a senior associate for organizational excellence. If you're wondering why you can't get into a Spanish section, or why the Economics department is so short-handed, well, that's one reason (or rather, three).
Perhaps it's worth restating some things that should be obvious. First, genuinely excellent institutions do not spend all their time talking about "excellence." They're too busy being excellent. Second, calling something excellent doesn't make it so. And finally, "excellence" shouldn't be just an all-purpose synonym for "stuff."
Don't get me wrong. This is a great university. We should recognize its achievements as well as its shortcomings.
But maybe we could dial it back a bit on all the excellence.
Gregory Hays is an associate professor in the Classics department.
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