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November 6, 1957

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It is perhaps only a commonplace to note that no scientist today can hope
to encompass more than a rather small sector of his own subdivision of
scientific knowledge. But an identical refinement and fragmentation of
function and skill has taken place in other fields as well. Military strategy
rests importantly on the advice of scholars and technical experts in matters
far removed from military operations as such. The conduct of government
depends heavily on the talents of the economist, the agronomist, the public
health expert. Even the operation of business is no longer possible without
recourse to specialized assistance. Industrial psychologists, market
research specialists, tax lawyers, highly trained accountants, personnel
officers are indispensable to the successful operation of a large corporate
enterprise.

Meanwhile a third factor must be added to the other two. This is the
tremendous expansion and systematization of research. It is an ever more
widely recognized fact that our nation's progress and prosperity -- to say
nothing of its national security -- hinge directly on the exploration of the
boundaries of human knowledge. As a result, research and development have
been catapulted from minor activities carried on by a few private and public
agencies to central and essential roles in almost every large corporation
and government department. The demand for research talent is growing at a
quickening pace and the demand for original and creative thought carries
the highest national priority.

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Thus the present prospect seems to be an invigorating one. At every
level of our national life the trend is toward higher requirements of skill
and training -- whether to man our industrial apparatus or to staff our ever
more complex institutions or to carry out the vital research functions on
which society so directly depends. The universal need is for higher individual
achievements; indeed, it is probably fair to say that never before has our
society been so conscious of its dependence on our individual capacities,
and that never before have the opportunities for personal accomplishment been
so widespread.

Yet the existence of a new and richer framework of opportunities is
only a new dimension of possibilities. It is a challenge -- and it requires
that we meet it with an adequate response. And here we can speak with less
certainty about the future. For the opportunities provided by our changing
technological structure are matched by the problems of our changing social
structure. On the one hand we are a more complex, exacting, technically
demanding society. But on the other hand we are also a more organized and
bureaucratic one.

Bureaucracy is not in itself necessarily an evil. Delicately inter-
dependent social mechanisms cannot run without synchronization and order-
liness, and it is the purpose of bureaucracy to provide this steadying influence.
But whereas bureaucracy has its very necessary functions, it also poses
severe and sometimes crippling obstacles to a society's vitality. At a certain
point the administration of activity can take priority over the activity itself.

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Then bureaucracy no longer serves a stabilizing function but a stultifying one.

But even in the best of bureaucracies, the environment presents a stifling atmosphere for the exercise of personal striving. The organizational framework offers a setting in which advancement is geared to good average performance, and in which exceptional performance -- simply because it violates established procedures and modes of thought -- is apt to be discouraged. It is not that large organizations encourage incompetence; the trouble, rather, is that they enthroned mere competence. The personalities they breed are "sound" but uninspired; the qualities they promote are those of conformity rather than originality. The very smoothness of bureaucratic life tempts individuals to set their sights too low.

There is no gainsaying the fact that we live in an ever more organized society. Not alone in government but in business, in academic life, even in research, the emphasis is on "teamwork" -- an admirable end in some respects, but one which carries with it the danger of hobbling the exceptional person to the pace of his colleagues. Thus the problem ahead is not that of the opportunities offered by our changing society, but of the level of striving with which we will meet those opportunities. We face the problem of a society in where there are more roads to achievement than ever before, but in where the roads increasingly converge on the citadels of routine. It is the problem of a society where achievement is too easily defined in mediocre terms, and where excellence may be rejected because there is no longer any place for it.

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VI

And thus a consideration of some of America's basic concerns brings us finally to a philosophic issue. This is the eternal tug of war, more acute today perhaps than ever before, between two democratic ideals. One of these is the ideal of equality. It is the concern for the individual person who has been unfairly disadvantaged in life. It is this concern, for example, which lies behind our insistence that the Negro must be taken out of his urban ghetto, or that the growth in the demand for education must be met by an expansion of adequate facilities for education.

But there is as well another concern which underlies our democratic way of life. This is a high regard for individual excellence and for the encouragement of individual performance. It is from this ideal of private growth that a democratic society derives its impetus. An indispensable source of our momentum has been the belief that great exertion will find its own reward.

Between equality and excellence there need be no conflict. Yet in fact two ideals have long jarred against one another and have created what is perhaps the classic dilemma of a democracy. This is a situation searching explored by John Gardner:

"...On the one hand it (democracy) is the form of society which says most convincingly, 'Let the best man win,' and rewards winners regardless of origin. On the other hand, it is the form of society which gives losers the widest latitude in rewriting the rules of the contest. No one who has not

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thought long and hard about these paradoxical facts is in
a position to understand the tug of war between equality
and excellence in a democracy. When the rewriting of the
rules is prompted by the standards of fair play, by
elementary considerations of justice, by basic value
judgments as to what sort of a 'best man' the society
wants, democracy can have no quarrel with it. Indeed,
it is the core process of a democracy. But when the
rewriting of the rules is designed to banish excellence,
to rule out distinguished attainment, to inhibit spirited
individuals, then all who pray for the continued vitality
of democracy must protest.

"Every democracy must encourage high individual
performance. If it does not then closes itself off from
the mainsprings of its dynamism and talent and imagination;
and the traditional democratic invitation to the individual
to realize his full potentialities becomes meaningless.
Because of the leveling influences which are inevitable in
popular government, a democracy must, more than any other
form of government, maintain what Ralph Barton Perry
has called 'an express insistence upon quality and distinction.'
When it does not do so, the consequences are all too
familiar: the deterioration of standards, the debasement
of taste, shoddy education, vulgar art, cheap politics,
and the tyranny of the lowest common denominator.

"...For whatever reason, there are large numbers
of individuals who will not necessarily find unrelieved
exhilaration in a system that emphasizes high performance.
If these large numbers come to believe that the system
exposes them unnecessarily to frustration and defeat, and
if they enjoy the freedom of social action characteristic
of a democracy they will create elaborate institutional
defenses to diminish the emphasis upon performance as a
determinant of status. We can observe such institutional
defenses not only in education but in every aspect of our
national life.

"Such defenses -- in one form or another -- will always
be with us. In their origin they are often healthy reactions
to excessive or exclusive emphasis upon performance. But
carried far enough these defenses too can constitute excesses
and can contribute a fatal rigidity to the society."

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In the light of this contest between equality and excellence some
of the basic concerns which we have examined take on a new significance.
Surely the enforced retirement of individuals at a predetermined age is a
means of achieving equality at the expense of individual fulfillment. And
so too does our educational dilemma now reveal itself as a yet more
profound issue.

For hitherto our most brilliant educational achievement has consisted
in providing universal education for an ever-increasing populace. Our
concern has been that of equality -- we have turned our social idealism
on the admirable aim of eliminating the disadvantages that come of a lack
of access to training and knowledge. And it is this moral concern which
still lies uppermost in our minds when we confront the enormous increase
in the demand for education and ask, how shall we satisfy it for everyone?

But our concern with equality has often conflicted with the cultivation
of individual excellence and achievement. In a school system where the
amount and rate of learning is geared to the average, it is the ablest students
who become the handicapped. One index of the resulting waste is that of
the most talented 25 percent of our high school students, one half, or
200,000 each year, fail to continue their education into college -- some
because of lack of means, but at least as many for lack of motivation. Thus
the paradox of our educational problem is that by insisting on standards of
equality, we are in fact inflicting a subtle but serious inequality on ourselves;

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while we send on the average student to our overcrowded colleges, we may
be failing to stimulate the exceptional student who should go to college.
In a society which depends as critically as ours upon self-development, we
cannot afford to let so much talent be wasted, much less waste away.

This is not a new problem for a democracy. Over a century ago,
De Tocqueville made the contest between equality and excellence the continuing
focus of his trenchant analysis of a new society. Half a century ago, the
same theme was eloquently set forth by William James: "Democracy is on
trial, and no one knows how it will stand the ordeal. What its critics
now affirm is that its preferences are inalterably for the inferior. So it
was in the beginning, they say, and so it will be world without end. Vulgarity
enthroned and institutionalized, elbowing everything superior from the highway,
this, they tell us, is our irremediable destiny."

The warnings are perhaps more apposite today than in the harsher
but more stimulating environments in which they were first put. For in the
very comfort of our emerging society lies the danger of complacency. In the
very success with which we advance the causes of fair play and justice and
protection of the weak we also increase the chances of supplanting excellence
with mediocrity, inhibiting the creative and gifted individual, discouraging
distinguished attainment, and elevating the inferior.

No one would call a halt to our efforts at social melioration because
we risk social mediocritization. The task rather is to re-establish the
independence of equality and excellence.

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There is no profounder question than that which asks how best we can
distribute widely the rewards of self-esteem and self-respect which release
the energies and provide the motivations of the whole population, while
at the same time dedicating ourselves to that cultivation of distinction and
the striving for excellence which alone can produce great achievements.

"We have to defend the country against mediocrity," said Abraham Flexner
many years ago. "Against mediocrity of soul, mediocrity of idea, mediocrity
of action. We must also fight it in ourselves."