It encompasses simultaneously the work of their Synthetic Biologists and Urban Sociologists, their Anglo-Saxonists and Concert Pianists. It applies to their teaching, research, and management. It can describe alike the activities of the world's top research universities and its smallest liberal arts colleges. In Germany, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft supports its “Clusters of Excellence” through a long standing “Excellence Initiative” ( OECD, 2014).Īs this range of examples suggests, “excellence”, as used by universities and their funders, is a flexible term that operates in a variety of contexts across a range of registers. In Australia, the national review framework is known as “Excellence in Research for Australia”. In the United Kingdom, the “Research Excellence Framework” uses expert assessment of “excellence” as a means of channelling differential funding to departments and institutions. The University Grants Commission of India recently awarded 15 institutions the title of “University with Potential for Excellence” ( University Grants Commission, 2016). ![]() The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest funder of civilian science in the United States, claims to fund “the best science by the best scientists” ( Nicholson and Ioannidis, 2012) and regularly supports “centres of excellence”. The Wellcome Trust, a large medical funder, has grants for “sustaining excellence” ( Sustaining Excellence Awards, 2016). A study of the National Endowment for the Humanities is entitled Excellence and Equity ( Miller, 2015). ![]() The academic funding environment, likewise, is saturated with this discourse. Funding agencies use “excellence to recognize excellence” ( Nowotny, 2014). University research offices and faculties turn this goal into reality through centres and programmes of “excellence”, which are in turn linked through networks such as the Canadian “Networks of Centres of Excellence” or German “Clusters of Excellence” ( OECD, 2014 Networks of Centres of Excellence of Canada 2015). Institutional mission statements or advertisements proclaim, in almost identical language, their “international reputation for excellence” (for example, Baylor, Imperial College London, Loughborough University, Monash University, The University of Sheffield), or the extent to which they are guided by principles of “excellence” (University of Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon, Gustav Adolphus, University College London, Warwick and so on). “Excellence” is the gold standard of the university world. This article is published as part of a collection on the future of research assessment. Used in its current unqualified form it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship. In the final analysis, it turns out that that “excellence” is not excellent. We conclude by proposing an alternative rhetoric based on soundness and capacity-building. But we also show that this rhetoric is an internal, and not primarily an external, imposition. ![]() We trace the roots of issues in reproducibility, fraud, and homophily to this rhetoric. To investigate whether this linguistic function is useful we examine how the rhetoric of excellence combines with narratives of scarcity and competition to show that the hyper-competition that arises from the performance of “excellence” is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. Rather it functions as a linguistic interchange mechanism. But does “excellence” actually mean anything? Does this pervasive narrative of “excellence” do any good? Drawing on a range of sources we interrogate “excellence” as a concept and find that it has no intrinsic meaning in academia. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organizations, from art history to zoology. The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy.
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