2004 New Faculty Orientation
Found in Union University Core Values > Excellence-Driven
Mark Dubis, Associate Professor of Christian Studies, Union University, Jackson, TN
The word “excellence” has become something of a buzzword in the business world. It is, for example, difficult to find a corporate mission statement that doesn’t at some point use the words “excellence” or “excellent.” The educational community similarly uses this terminology and we here at Union also in our mission statement speak of our desire to be a community of “excellence.” Even though the phrase is an overused catchword nowadays, I believe it is a fundamentally noble concept and one to which we as Christians and faculty at Union should indeed aspire. Yet one of the most important questions in this regard often goes unanswered—what do we mean by “excellence.” This is a term that corporations and institutions can blithely throw around as though everyone understands exactly what is meant by it. But do we? How would we define it in concrete terms? How would we recognize it if we saw it? And, importantly, does Union’s Christian identify affect how we conceive of what it means to be “excellent”?
A number of years back now, Alexander Astin, director of research for the American Council on Education and the National Merit Scholarship Corporation and later a professor of higher education at UCLA, wrote a book entitled Achieving Educational Excellence (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1985). In this book Astin describes a variety of definitions of “excellence” that appear within the world of academia.
The first definition of “excellence” that Astin addresses is that of reputation. This view of excellence is strongly tied to surveys and institutional rankings. How do we know if we are an “excellent” institution? Other people say we are. Actually, when you boil things down, Astin says that folks could save all of the expense of doing their surveys because a school’s reputation is very closely tied to a small number of institutional characteristics. For graduate schools, one could reliably estimate the assessed reputation of a school on the basis of 3 characteristics: student selectivity, per-student expenditures, and the number of departments granting doctorates. For undergraduate schools like Union, one’s standing in the rankings has a very close correlation with 2 characteristics: student selectivity and size. In other words, for undergraduate schools, the bigger and more selective you are, the better reputation you are likely to have. So, the question follows, if Union were to continue to raise its entrance requirements and continue to grow in our enrollment with the expected result that we would be viewed as an institution of excellence, would that thereby make us excellent? I think we can see the fallacy of that thought process—just because other people think that we’re excellent doesn’t mean that we are. And from a biblical and theological perspective, one of the themes of the New Testament is that our ultimate concern is to please God, and God is a God who looks on the heart—in other words, he knows not just the reputation but the reality of things.
The second view of excellence as Astin sets this forth is tied to resources. One is an excellent institution if one has excellent resources. Resources can be divided into four categories: faculty and staff, physical facilities, students, and money. Faculty resources are measured in terms of the percentage holding doctorates, publication rates, scholarly visibility. Student resources are measured in terms of scores on standardized tests, number of National Merit Scholars, etc. Facilities are measured in terms of library holdings, number of classrooms, laboratories, residential facilities, etc. Financial resources are measured in terms of endowment, faculty salaries, per-student expenditures, etc. But are these a proper measure of educational excellence? Can we conceive of an institution that has all of these resources and yet fails to provide an excellent education? If we can conceive of such an institution, then resources cannot be our sole criterion of what it means to be excellent. Although I am unaware whether Astin has any Christian commitments, he does make a remark in keeping with a countercultural Christian outlook when he says, “One major appeal of the resources view lies in its consistency with today’s dominant values. We live in a highly acquisitive society, in which the quality of life and the worth of the individual are often equated with material possessions. . . . Little wonder, then, that so many persons equate quality in higher education with institutional resources” (p. 43).
The third definition of “excellence” that Astin explores is that of “outcomes.” This moves closer to the ultimate definition of excellence that Astin himself embraces, but Astin nevertheless offers warnings here. Some measures of outcomes may not be true indicators of educational excellence. For example, a college might point to the average score of their college seniors on the GRE, but this in reality seems to be driven more by the SAT scores of entering freshmen than anything else. In other words, one way to assure good output (good GRE scores in this case) is to have good input (good SAT scores). But an educational institution should be concerned mostly about what happens between the input and output phase, the time when an institution has been entrusted with a given set of students.
This brings us to Astin’s own ultimate definition of excellence in education which he refers to as a “talent development model.” He says that excellence in education can only be measured against what the purpose of education is. Excellence is achieved when an institution is especially successful in accomplishing its purpose. And Astin tells us what he thinks the purpose of educational institutions should be: “the major purpose of any institution of higher education is to develop the talents of its faculty and students to their maximum potential.” Astin’s definition of excellence is, in my opinion, a better definition of excellence that the other alternatives he mentions. In ways, it is a common-sense kind of definition. But, by defining excellence in terms of “purpose,” Astin’s definition has the advantage of setting our attention where it should be, namely, upon asking the fundamental question as to what it is that we are trying to accomplish and measuring ourselves in terms of how well we have achieved our aim.
I think we can affirm Astin’s definition as far as it goes, but from the perspective of a Christian university, Astin’s definition does not say enough. Yes, I think we can affirm that our goal at Union should be to develop the talents of our students to their maximum potential. But to what end? Why is it that we want them to reach their full potential. So that they can command the highest salaries possible? So that they can live fully-realized lives? So that their accomplishments will redound to the reputation of Union and our own individual reputations? This is where Union’s mission statement sets an understanding of excellence within its proper framework, a framework that shapes our purpose differently than that of secular colleges, namely in that our desire for excellence is ultimately concerned to bring glory to God. This is, as the opening question of the Westminster catechism puts it, the chief end of man, namely, to glorify God and enjoy him forever. This must also be the chief end of our education as well. Yes, we want to develop the talents of our students to their full potential but this is only a penultimate goal. Our ultimate goal is that we might develop our students to their full potential as people of Christian character who know how to think Christianly about their various disciplines and are able through word and deed to bear a credible Christian witness to those around them so that God himself might be properly honored. This concern, and nothing less, must continue to be the starting and ending point of Union’s definition of excellence.
Responding to these first two definitions, reputation and resources, Astin notes that if either of these views is valid, then there is a limit to the amount of excellence that is possible in higher education. If Union has to compete with the reputation and resources of Harvard and Yale and UC-Berkeley in order to be excellent, then we might as well give up on our core value of being “excellence-driven.” And I don’t think we should.