What We Talk About When We Talk About Excellence

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Graduation approaches! As we near the end of the academic year—my first here—and all that comes with it (grading, pageanting, congratulating, breathing), I’m grateful for so many aspects of my WashU life, and among the most memorable are my conversations and interactions with you, our faculty, from across our campuses.

I recently heard from a colleague who said something that I can’t quite shake, which often is a sign that I should probably write about it, even if I’m not entirely sure where it will land. If our colleague and I are thinking about it, it’s likely that others are as well. So let’s talk about it. And because this is a university, we can thrive on disagreement if we’re not on the same page.

Before I go further, it’s important to explicitly recognize that some of what sits underneath this conversation is not especially comfortable. Thinking seriously about our mission and about how well we are supporting it might lead us into areas that are challenging and aspirational. My hope is that we can approach that work together, with a shared understanding that it matters, even when it’s difficult (and it likely will be). I’ve been here long enough to know that there will be times when we’re going to have to address some Hard Stuff. (One of you asked me if I knew about the Hard Stuff when I took the job. Yes. And to borrow from Jim McLeod’s expression for how we should know our students, learning the “names and stories” of our faculty also adds vibrance, color, and context that make me so proud to be a part of our community.) Hard Stuff is not a bad thing in itself, and I think we can safely say that having a strong foundation rooted in a shared understanding of our mission will be a key to our success. I will address some of the Hard Stuff as we continue our conversation in future communications. 

Our colleague’s point might not quite be Hard Stuff, but it’s still a little thorny. Their primary idea was simple, which doesn’t mean “easy”: Perhaps I, and by extension others, spend too much time talking about concepts like “excellence” and “thriving”—concepts that can seem nebulous—and not enough time talking directly about the purpose of the—no, our—university. The argument, which was stated more clearly than I’m likely to manage here, is that universities do not exist for the purpose of serving an abstract concept of “excellence”; that’s just an adjective that we affix to what we do that doesn’t particularly distinguish us as an academic institution. Universities exist for the discovery, preservation, and sharing of knowledge. If we do those things well, we will be excellent. If we don’t, we won’t. 

This discussion leads me to a foundational question: What does “excellence” actually mean?

The lawyer in me, and perhaps the English professor or other form of learning and expertise in you, can’t help but wonder whether some of what we are dealing with might be semantic. When I talk about “excellence,” I think I mean something close to “doing our mission well.” But I also recognize that words carry baggage, or perhaps there is something here that Wittgenstein would recognize in a sort of “meaning is use” kind of way. One of you has mildly admonished me, and quite fairly, for dropping scholarly references like this when I don’t fully understand the context, and this is such a time; I can only hope that linguists and philosophers, among others, will forgive me for the relatively shallow reference. But this stuff—the baggage, the “meaning is use” position, and perhaps exhaustion—mean that if we’re (I’m) not careful, “excellence” might obscure more than it clarifies. And unfortunately, it also is one of those words that is so versatile and overused that it has lost some intensity and has become difficult to define (like “really,” “awesome,” or, lately, “cute”). So we don’t define it. Or analyze it. Or even think about it when we say it sometimes. We just say it. 

So let me try to be more precise.

Our mission is to generate, disseminate, and apply knowledge. That work takes many forms across our campuses and disciplines, but it is the throughline that connects what we do. And it is not just one priority among many; it is the thing to which everything else should, in some way, be oriented. (I’m aware that “everything else” has almost as heavy a lift in that sentence as “excellent.”) If that’s true—and I believe it is—then two questions follow fairly quickly.

First: How well are we supporting that mission today?

Second: What obstacles lie in the way of doing it better?

We are operating in an environment that presents real challenges to the work of universities, including financial pressures, public skepticism, shifting expectations, and (depending on your field(s)) constraints on how research and teaching can be conducted. I won’t attempt to catalog all of those here, but it would be disingenuous to suggest that they don’t shape our ability to do our work.

I also won’t dance around the fact that some obstacles are internal (and here we might be closer to what some of you might consider Hard Stuff). Universities are complex places (surprise!), and not every structure, process, or priority we have developed over time is perfectly aligned with our core mission. Some of them support it directly; others, less so. Part of our collective responsibility, and certainly mine, is to examine those things with some regularity and ask whether they are helping us do the work we are here to do. 

This brings me to the second part of my conversation with our colleague, which I also found compelling: The central administration should communicate more directly, more candidly, and more concretely about the mission of the university, how it is being challenged, and how we support it going forward.

I agree. So consider this message a(nother) step in that direction, though not the final footfall by any means. 

The standard for whether we are doing our job well is not whether we have used the right language, or even whether we have achieved some relatively abstract—how would we measure it so we can know how to improve?—notion of “excellence,” but whether faculty are able to discover, preserve, and share knowledge.

If we are doing that, then we are on the right track. If we are not, then we have work to do. I suspect that both of those statements hold some truth.

I don’t have a neat conclusion here (I didn’t even have a great subject line; I modified Haruki Murakami’s book title What I Talk About When I Talk About Running; it seemed close). But I think it would be useful for us to spend more time—together—talking plainly about what our mission requires of us, and what it requires from those of us whose roles are to support it. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

Best,
Mark

Mark D. West
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs