Editors' Introduction: Vision, Excellence, and the Values of Being Difficult

Don't teach them writing. Don't teach them reading. Teach them the habit of giving reasons for what they think, and explain how reading and writing can help them do that. If the basic goal of general education is instilling and exercising the habit of giving reasons, the apt way to characterize the larger commitment of education is that it should be difficult and, more exactly, that it is about intellectual difficulty as something to be sought and about being difficult as a way to be.

—James F. Slevin

Experienced as I am with such excellence, it is nonetheless difficult for me to explain. And maybe that difficulty tells us something about excellence.

—Harold Hellenbrand

No authority can terminate the pedagogic relation, no knowledge can save us the task of thinking. It is in this sense that the posthistorical University can perhaps relinquish the presumption to unite authority and autonomy in a community unified by an idea: be it the idea of reason, culture, communication, or professional excellence.

—Bill Readings

Our institutions—and it seems most colleges and universities we've noticed—are enmeshed in the recently popular process sometimescalled "vision planning."¹ The stated purpose of such a project is to chart the direction the university should take over the next five or so years by establishing priorities or goals and then charting the benchmarks by which success in meeting these goals would be measured. It is difficult as faculty—particularly humanities faculty—not to become cynical about such a project, both in terms of the kind of future these visions define and in terms of the emphasis on quantifying accountability. As James Slevin (2002: 65–66) remarks, "Like any good faculty member, I find myself just wanting to whine about all this"; instead, he trenchantly analyzes the discourse of such documents as a starting point to resistance:²

We are all familiar with the pervasiveness within the university nowadays of a discourse, derived from finance and accounting, of objectives, accountability, assessment, resources, selling (of credits to customers), and delivery (of instruction to the purchasers of credits and ultimately of the instructed to appropriate work positions). . . . The trick is the way this language is strewn with a discourse of another sort, deploying terms like "engagement," "collaboration," "working together," and "collective responsibility" and asking that the faculty look to the "common good" toward which they are to "contribute." This language combines a discourse of commerce and a discourse of community, underwriting it all by using an observation about the calendar ("As we move into the next century") to invoke—without having to explain—a destiny to which we must accommodate ourselves.

One might wonder what is wrong with the notion of a community working toward or having a vision of the common good, except that we know that coming to adefinition of communityand of the good can be fraught. If the community can't agree on what's good, how can we work together to achieve our vision of it? Slevin rightly suggests that the rhetoric of such statements encourages a "for us or against us" mentality. Who after all but the worst outmoded curmudgeon could be opposed to community? Moreover, it is ironic, in these times of assessment fatigue, that the successful corporate-like calls for accountability are now being couched in language that suggests seemingly anticorporate values such as cooperation and the common good.

To offer one example: as we write this, Marcy's universityhas been involved in focus group discussions of various aspects of the university's vision statement in an attempt to flesh out the priorities (and ultimately the measurements) of each area.³ In discussing the issue of academic excellence, many ways of "raising standards" were discussed: increasing admissions requirements, focusing on increasing the rigor of first-year programs; reducing grade inflation; eliminating student evaluation forms, and so on. These are not revolutionary ideas. But what strikes us is that in these discussions of what constitutes academic excellence, no direct discussions of teaching surfaced. On the one hand, caught up in...