University of Virginia Library

In Pursuit Of Excellence

For compared to the far greater
goal of excellence, all else was so
trivial and so low.

A college paper has of course
the hardest task: it must not try to
be as objective as The New York
Times: it must try to be more so.
For The Times is of course run by
pros who rarely make mistakes; a
college paper, by amateurs who
make many. That is why a college
paper must make a scrupulous
attempt to do what they know is
right: they will make enough
honest errors without committing
international ones. That is why the
picture of a student with "Fuck"
on his T-shirt should never run in
an excellent college paper — as it
did unfortunately in the C.D.

All of which is stuffy and too
impossibly hard, you say? Yes, yes,
to be sure. And can one really
attain excellence?

The point is not that one
attains excellence; excellence is
more a star to steer by than a real
goal: something to be closer to —
as close to as one's talents will let
him — than farther way from.

Mountain Climbing

And in any case in pursuing
excellence, a person will be like
James Ramsay Ullmann's mountain
climber: a man who is never more a
man than when he climbs
mountains he can never climb:
when he is at that point when he
can go no farther. But always his
eyes are on the peak and every
faculty that is his would take him
there.

So the editor who seeks
excellence will provide himself not
only with a craft or his campus
with an outstanding (and thus
useful) newspaper. More, he will
fight the good — the very best —
fight: the fight for the excellence of
our works which are the meaning of
our lives.