\u201cExcellence R Us\u201d: university research and the fetishisation of excellence

Samuel Moore,Cameron Neylon,Damian Pattinson,Daniel Paul O’Donnell,Martin Paul Eve

doi:10.1057/palcomms.2016.105

Abstract

The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organizations, from art history to zoology. 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. Rather it functions as a linguistic interchange mechanism. 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. We trace the roots of issues in reproducibility, fraud, and homophily to this rhetoric. But we also show that this rhetoric is an internal, and not primarily an external, imposition. We conclude by proposing an alternative rhetoric based on soundness and capacity-building. In the final analysis, it turns out that that “excellence” is not excellent. Used in its current unqualified form it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship. This article is published as part of a collection on the future of research assessment.

Highlights

The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy
We have argued that, while many commentaries reviewed throughout this piece lay the blame for this at the feet of external actors—institutional administrators captured by neo-liberal ideologies, funders over-focussed on delivering measurable returns rather than positive change, governments obsessed with economic growth at the cost of social or community value—the roots of the problem lie in the internal narratives of the academy and the nature of “excellence” and “quality” as supposedly shared concepts that researchers have developed into shields of their autonomy
Our argument here is not that expanding our boundary for resourcing from “excellence” to “soundness” and “capacity” is all that is necessary to change research culture and improve the distribution of resources; rather, it is that a move from resourcing based on the performance of an ineluctable quality to one based on the demonstration of documentable, socially developed practice, is the first step to solving the problems our rhetoric of “excellence” has created