Querying excellence in higher education: four dance faculty navigate expectations and responsibilities

The oft-undefined term of excellence continually seeps into mission statements of postsecondary institutions. Its import becomes a tool for promoting current successes while advocating for future possibilities. At the same time, the term can cloak institutional biases and inequities that underscore criteria for determining faculty excellence. Dance programs and their practices in higher education are not excluded from such variable and ambiguous usages of the term. In this article, four dance faculty employ a collaborative autoethnographic research methodology to interrogate the culture of excellence created by policies and implicit ideas of excellence in higher education. As they reflect upon their lived experiences within this cultural landscape, tensions and fissures are revealed that simultaneously disrupted and advanced their career trajectories. The authors’ intent, and in alignment with the tenets of a collaborative autoethnography framework, is to offer different perceptions and experiences with excellence. In doing so, potential pathways for rethinking the entrenched state of excellence and its role within higher education become illuminated.