Excellence

In Terry Stanford’s final address to the Faculty of Duke University, circa, 1984:

“Everybody is seeking excellence, or claims to be. I sometimes think we have misused the word or weakened it by overuse. Excellence is not a brand of cheese. It is not even a place. It is more like a path or a guiding star. A single professor in a classroom in a small and otherwise inadequate college may seek excellence with as much validity as does the total institution of, say, the Johns Hopkins University. Every individual, every institution, can seek excellence in performance. That does not suggest by any means that they will all end at the same place, because excellence is not a destination. It is a spirit; it is a determination; it is a set of personal and institutional values…. “

James “Terry” Stanford, President of Duke University