Excellence in Higher Education: Is There Really No Alternative?

Nash, Andrew

Excellence in Higher Education: Is There Really No Alternative?

Chapter in Book

2013-03

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Political Studies

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Series

Kagisano

Abstract

Excellence, according to Bill Readings, “has become the unifying principle of the contemporary university” (1996: 22). Excellence is the central category in the university’s current self-conception, the point on which managerial authority believes itself to be at its strongest, and at times believes itself to be impregnable. The only alternative to excellence in this discourse — or the only alternative that can be admitted — is mediocrity. In the South African context, this contrast can be given a political and racial edge, as in Mamphela Ramphele’s claim that “Black people did not fight against apartheid only to settle for mediocrity” (2008: 219). Student struggles against apartheid raised the banner of freedom, rather than excellence, but these struggles can be used to legitimate excellence and to give retrospective content to the idea of freedom. To think critically about excellence, we need to see it not just as an outcome but also as a managerial practice or system that impacts on every aspect of higher education. We also have to see how it fills a pressing historical need within academic life. All too often, the advocates of excellence conceal that history, making it impossible for us to ask whether that need could be met in other ways.

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