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