Seeking excellence, without apology

What is remarkable and compelling about true excellence is that it brings with it the impulse for aspiration, a model for following, a standard that invites an urge for similar achievement. The notion of excellence provides an aspirational standard for those who struggle for great achievement and who see in that struggle a link to their better selves.

Last Friday night I listened to the New York Philharmonic orchestra play Beethoven in Ann Arbor’s jam-packed and enthusiastic Hill Auditorium. The next afternoon, I watched the University of Michigan Wolverines trounce Northwestern in an equally jam-packed and enthusiastic Michigan Stadium.

Two events. They couldn’t have been more unlike, except for this: They both represent a level of excellence that is significant, rare, inspiring ‒ and totally necessary for our society.

Under the baton of the boyish, yet compelling 48-year-old maestro Alan Gilbert, the New York Phil – one of the greatest orchestras in the world – brought forth the magnificence of power, precision and emotional exaltation of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

Presenting the concert was the University Musical Society, which since 1879 has brought excellence to Michigan audiences through the very best of music and the performing arts. On Sept. 10, President Obama presented the society, through UMS President Kenneth Fischer, with a 2014 National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest public artistic honor.

The Northwestern game marked another stage in the “rise, fall and return” of Michigan football, as so movingly and astutely presented in John U. Bacon’s recent book, “Endzone: The Rise, Fall and Return of Michigan Football.” Describing the managerial errors behind the recent self-destruction of the U-M football program, author Bacon concludes, “After more than a century of sound stewardship, Michigan lost its way. It ignored established safeguards, and forgot the values that made it great. The resulting downfall was swift and stunning.”

Finally, a new football coach, Jim Harbaugh, was brought to Ann Arbor as the unquestioned “Michigan Man,” the inheritor of the values, grit and insistence on excellence that made Bo Schembechler a legend in his own time. In its first few games, Harbaugh’s team has more than fully responded.

Reflecting on these two events brings me to the notion of excellence and the often closely-linked but enormously different terms, “elitism” and “arrogance.”

Some people confuse focus on excellence as a sign of elitism. Nonsense; what’s elitist about starting your best athlete as quarterback?

Nor is excellence necessarily accompanied by arrogance, but all too often it is. Folks at Michigan State used to talk about the “arrogant asses from Ann Arbor” (maybe they still do) and the insult was ‒ from time to time ‒ much too close for comfort.

What is remarkable and compelling about true excellence is that it brings with it the impulse for aspiration, a model for following, a standard that invites an urge for similar achievement. The notion of excellence provides an aspirational standard for those who struggle for great achievement and who see in that struggle a link to their better selves.

Arrogance, on the other hand, repels. It captures the dark underside of achievement, poisoning effort by linking it to overweening pride, to the urge to put down others striving for achievement and the unwillingness to recognize that pride, indeed, goes before a fall.

This is not just idle philosophizing. In its cheating rush to be Number One, the German auto company, Volkswagen, succeeded in its arrogance in wounding itself grievously, maybe permanently, by deliberately cheating on emissions tests for the American market. And as author Bacon demonstrates in detail, the Michigan football program’s arrogant failure to cleave to well-established values lay at the core of its recent decline.

Societies, whether nations, states or small groups, need to experience excellence to inspire them to greater effort, to demonstrate that the shared concrete goal of aspiration is just as real as it is difficult to achieve. People who listened to the New York Philharmonic plumb the depths of Beethoven will never hear the Seventh Symphony in quite the same way.

U-M President Mark Schlissel speaks repeatedly of how important the football program is in pulling together a diverse and complicated university community; the collective joy in Michigan Stadium at the end of the game last Saturday conclusively proved the point.

Over the past decade, our state has endured a back-breaking period of turmoil and decline. That there are lots of places in Michigan – not just in Ann Arbor, but in the grit of Detroit, the energy of Grand Rapids, the fall glory of the Upper Peninsula ‒ that give us all a taste of excellence, make our lives together richer and much more meaningful and hopefully also give us all the energy and will to keep pushing ahead.