Slouching Towards ‘Excellence’

Why the University of Austin isn't as radical as it thinks

To mark the beginning of the fall semester, The Free Press published the convocation speech delivered by Carlos Carvalho, the president of the University of Austin (an institution with which Bari Weiss’s anti-woke Substack juggernaut is closely affiliated). At the beginning of the speech, Carvalho promises to “do something a bit unfashionable” and “defend inequality.” He goes on:

Equality, without excellence, is the surest path to national decline. A free society, to remain dynamic and free, must enable those gifts to develop rather than force them into a common mold. So even in a republic of equals, we need small sanctuaries of aristocracy and excellence to ensure the success of liberty.

Ostensibly, this commitment is what sets Austin apart from the competition:

Nearly every university in America has decided to answer that question by abandoning excellence. Harvard hands out more A’s than any other grade. Yale gives nearly 60 percent of students straight A’s. Princeton no longer requires Greek or Latin to major in the classics. Columbia proudly ditched the SAT. In our leading institutions, honors are handed out like candy while calculus is quietly dropped.

At UATX, we know you cannot democratize a serious education by watering it down and expecting to keep its substance.

Grade inflation is a very real problem at elite universities. However, Carvalho leaves out the fact that the institutions he mentions are in fact quite unlike “nearly every university in America” in that they are highly selective in admissions, whereas the vast majority of colleges are minimally selective or open admissions. Hence, while Harvard and Yale do indeed give out an absurd proportion of A’s, they are also very hard to get into, which is one of the reasons they are inflating grades in the first place: They have a lot of students who have gotten straight A’s their whole lives, so if they get a B+, they break down in tears and call mom and/or email the dean (I’ve seen both these things happen).

By eliding this aspect of the situation, Carvalho fails to point out what is most bizarre about top-tier American universities: the dissonance between their stated ideological commitment to “inclusion” and the fact that their selling point is being as exclusive as possible. (Indeed, they compete with each other on precisely these grounds—most notably, by deliberately driving their acceptance rates ever lower through all manner of rigging and manipulation.)

One might think of Carvalho’s speech as the higher-education edition of the broader phenomenon of anti-woke branding that has emerged amid the post-2024 vibe shift. For instance, Sydney Sweeney’s “good jeans” campaign inverts the body positivity and diversity initiatives of the prior decade of ads, offering consumers a return to the basics (hot female bodies that appeal to the lust of the median consumer). Similarly, UATX claims to offer a return to unalloyed academic meritocratic elitism without the anti-elitist overlay that exclusive institutions have felt the need to adopt in recent decades.

However, what Carvalho’s account lacks is an analysis of why these institutions fell into these paroxysms of (suspiciously self-congratulatory) self-abasement in the first place. Or rather, I imagine he and the rest of UATX’s analysis is roughly that they were infected with the “woke mind virus.” I’ve written elsewhere about why I think the “virus” metaphor is unhelpful here, so rather than repeating those arguments, I will simply assert my own view: The reason that exclusive universities embraced the incongruous discourse of “inclusion” is that, like elites and their institutions in many times and places, they face a crisis of legitimacy. That is, they need a public-facing way to justify the privileges accorded to them. The “inclusion” idea worked to some extent, for a while, until it didn’t, and now they’re in crisis again.

The University of Austin is not an elite institution, so it faces different challenges, one of which is to meme into existence the idea that it is one. To that end, its incentives may be the opposite of the ones that led Yale and Harvard to embrace DEI-flavored noblesse oblige. The sort of brash overconfidence typical of the startup founders who bankroll it may well prove to be a more suitable marketing strategy. That said, it was striking to me to what extent, even as he claimed to repudiate elite university branding, Carvalho fell back onto one of the favored buzzwords of deans across the land: “excellence.” He treats this word, which appears 15 times in his speech, as the watchword of UATX’s bold dissent from the mediocrity-affirming status quo of higher education. Apparently, Carvalho hasn’t been paying much attention to what his fellow administrators have been saying for decades.

Bill Readings’s 1996 book The University of Ruins, still the best account of higher education’s long-term crisis of legitimacy, devoted an entire chapter to exploring how “excellence” became every college president’s favorite buzzword. According to Readings, the university’s “legitimation struggle” derives from the fact that “it is no longer clear what the place of the University is within society.” It was amid this loss of purpose, he argues, that the language of “excellence,” came to be used by “university administrators, government officials, and even radical critics.” What’s noteworthy about “excellence” as a guiding value is its sheer lack of content: “excellence has the singular advantage of being entirely meaningless, or to put it more precisely, non-referential.” Hence, “what gets taught or researched matters less than the fact that it is excellently taught and researched.”

Readings goes on to say:

the appeal to excellence marks the fact that there is no longer any idea of the University, or rather that the idea has now lost all content. As a non-referential unit of value entirely internal to the system, excellence marks nothing more than the moment of technology’s self-reflection. All that the system requires is for activity to take place, and the empty notion of excellence refers to nothing other than the optimal input/output ratio in matters of information.

The rise of “excellence,” in Readings’s account, reflects the primacy of market values, since “like the cash-nexus . . . it has no content; it is neither true nor false.” But interestingly, Readings argues that this development aided the rise of what we would now call “woke” scholarship, often characterized by anti-elite posturing, in the heart of elite institutions. Since “the stakes of the university’s functioning are no longer essentially ideological,” even scholarship antagonistic towards its ostensible ideals—for instance, scholarship attacking colleges as redoubts of white supremacy or handmaidens of capitalist domination—can be deemed “excellent.”

Because the University of Austin’s founders and leaders have no analysis of the crisis of the university other than the “woke mind virus” thesis, which assumes its problems are accidental, it is unsurprising that they have fallen back into the familiar discourse of “excellence.” I argued shortly after its launch in 2021 that “despite its hostile reception by the establishment, UATX looks less like a radical challenge to elite higher education than a last-ditch effort to rescue it—or rather, an idealized image of its past.” Should it succeed in meming itself into prestige, it will face some version of the same impasse as the institutions with which it seeks to compete.

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