/ 26 November 2010

A desert called excellence

A Desert Called Excellence

The idea of excellence has long played a part in higher education and many other areas of human life. But it is only in the past few decades, with the rise of the managerial university, that excellence has become the central category for discussing the aims of higher education.

It now presents itself as the unavoidable aspiration for institutions and academics alike. Within this framework, the only alternative to excellence is mediocrity. But this framework is mistaken, for excellence is not only an outcome — it is also a managerial system and culture and must be assessed in those terms.

The contemporary practice of excellence has three main characteristics. First, it measures academic achievement in predominantly quantitative terms, through bureaucratic processes. It does not require academics to read and debate one another’s work or see themselves as part of a collective enterprise. Each of them needs only to tick the same boxes.

Second, it depends on an ethically neutral conception of the aims of academic life. A cure for cancer may be no more “excellent” than a technique for marketing cigarettes to teenagers. Their excellence is measured by frequency of publication, standing of journals, citation rates, research funding and frequent flyer miles.

Third, excellence is promoted by a competitive system of individual rewards and penalties and systematically devalues the forms of academic community on which individual achievement depends. Individual universities or academics have no reason to celebrate when their neighbours improve. Neighbours become rivals, setting a standard against which they may be found wanting.

In South Africa excellence also integrates our universities into a subordinate role within an unequal global system through its preference for international recognition over contributions to local or national intellectual life. In this way it helps bring about a recolonisation of South African intellectual life.

The problem is not globalism, but rather the uncritical acceptance of the inequality of global wealth and power, requiring South Africans to imitate the global norm rather than developing our own distinctive contribution to the sum of human thought. This practice of excellence impacts on every aspect of academic life.

University managers sometimes defend systems of performance assessment, for example, by saying that it affects only those who don’t pull their weight — the notorious dead wood. But the accountancy of excellence impacts on every relationship in the university and the whole fabric of academic life.

Its impact may begin, for example, with academics producing shallow and uncontroversial research within narrow specialisations to meet the requirements of performance assessment. It spreads into the curriculum when academics design their courses in such a way as to leave more time for research.

The next step is for assignments to be marked by tutors — easily exploited graduate students who may not know much more about the course material than the students. Assignments are dumbed down accordingly and students learn the habits of intellectual passivity, academic formalism and reliance on jargon instead of learning to develop their own arguments and insights.

A specific human type is selected in this process — the type who sees academic debates as “games” in which their performance is an end in itself; who never questions their own approach to the subject matter but applies an established method mechanically; and who focuses on their own self-advancement and takes no responsibility for the collective good.

The uneven playing field of excellence favours these people and ensures that they fill the ranks of the next generation of academics, continuing the vicious cycle. The symptoms described here are widely recognised and form the subject of frequent, although often subdued, complaint. But the idea of excellence itself, which gives rise to these symptoms, remains largely invisible and hence unquestioned.

For the idea of excellence was historically essential to displacing the forms of authority and less formal systems of governance that characterised what we might call the patriarchal university, which depended on systems of personal patronage and reproduced various hierarchies of race, class, gender and the like. It produced a system of accountability, which was clearly needed, although one that reproduced and reinforced the distortions outlined above.

Patriarchal authority became unworkable as universities made the transition from elite to mass institutions, from being the birthright of the privileged few to becoming a gateway to employment. In this context the idea of excellence countered racial, ethnic or even national agendas, without challenging the universities’ compatibility with the needs of capitalism.

The essential role of the idea of excellence in this process makes it hard for us to see an alternative to it. Patriarchal authority was often experienced as benign. That is why some academics think fondly of the past. But there is no going back to it and no good reason to regret its passing.

Once we grasp the specific historical role of excellence in higher education in displacing patriarchy, however, at least in its most overt forms, we can also recognise its limits and how they can be overcome. We will not overcome those limits, I believe, without addressing the ethical tasks of higher education in all their ramifications.

The ethical neutrality implied by the idea of excellence was based on the fear that a university with a definite ethical stance would be prone to dogmatism, or to its imposition by church, party or state. It overlooked the age-old option of rational ethical debate. But the ethical neutrality that resulted was largely a pretence.

The implicit ethic of the managerial university is one of individual self-advancement. Once we abandon that pretence, we have no choice but to make ethical debate about the purposes of higher education an integral and ongoing part of academic life. We can then no longer reduce academic ethics to the defence of intellectual property or treat social responsiveness as a marketing tool.

A university that is ethical rather than excellent will have less time to produce narrowly specialised research. It will make the authority of deans and vice-chancellors less secure, as they become relatively equal participants in ongoing debate.

But it will make it possible to replace the intellectual wasteland of excellence with a community in which a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend, no longer formed and sustained by managerial incentives but by inner conviction and critical reflection.

Professor Andrew Nash is in the department of political studies at the University of Cape Town