In the bad old days, excellence was a rare quality. Times have changed, and now there’s much more of it about. A good thing too – why should only the elite be allowed to be excellent? From The Times: 

A GROUP of academic whistle-blowers have warned that British higher education is being blighted by watered-down degrees, rampant plagiarism and systematic pressure from university authorities to inflate the grades of weak undergraduates.

The complaints by the academics — working at universities including Oxford, Sussex, Birmingham, Cardiff and new institutions such as Central Lancashire and Manchester Metropolitan — have been presented in a 500-page dossier to an MPs’ inquiry.

 [...]

Those who have given evidence include Sue Evans, an economics lecturer of some 30 years’ standing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

She describes a disappointed Slovakian undergraduate saying last term: “This university is like high school in Slovakia.”

Another begged the department: “Don’t dumb down the subject any more than you already have.”

Evans also provides extensive allegations of marks frequently being revised upwards without justification. She says she has raised her concerns “repeatedly” with the university but without any response.

Her complaints are echoed by Stuart Derbyshire, a senior lecturer in psychology at BirminghamUniversity. On one occasion, he said: “When I complained, he [an external examiner charged with scrutinising standards] stated that it was no longer 1986 and that we cannot mark like we did in the past.

‘We must’, he said, ‘look harder for excellence’.”

That’s where our universities went wrong. In the dark days of 1986 those lazy dons awarded top degrees only to the obviously excellent. Now they “look harder” and find excellence in a candidate who can write his name. If you don’t find any excellence, you’re not looking hard enough. This is unsatisfactory - although it may be excellent in its own way.

Perhaps excellence is too narrow a concept. Why is there just one excellence? Why not multiple “excellences”? After all, we now have multiple intelligences and multiple competences, where scholars of old had to scrape by on just one of each. Yes, let’s have multiple excellences, none better and none worse than any other. I’ll have my excellency and you have your excellency and we’ll both be ambassadors for a new, non-judgmental elitism.