Democracy runs on equality; freedom and excellence run on inequality

«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.

Democracy runs on equality; freedom and excellence run on inequality.

The tension between those two realities shapes almost every real problem in education today. How do we respect every person’s equal dignity and opportunity while also recognizing and cultivating individual excellence?

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. Plato fed through ChatGPT turns Plato into a mediocre social media post. Macroeconomics without some basis in calculus is just cable news polemics.

The truth is that excellence has no shortcut. When people mass-produce artificial diamonds, they turn out to be pebbles that nobody values. The attempt to counterfeit excellence only cheapens it. If you make the difficult and the extraordinary dumbed down or commonplace, you destroy it.»

Excerpt from a September 4 speech by Carlos Carvalho, President of the University of Austin