Support the Person, Challenge the Performance

Across my years in higher education, I watched a quiet but persistent shift in institutional values. Achievement, excellence, and performance—once understood as the lifeblood of the academic enterprise—began to take a back seat to other values: inclusion, equity, and emotional safety. These are worthy pursuits. But they must never replace our responsibility to challenge people to grow, to stretch, and to do hard things well.

The best education doesn't protect students from difficulty—it equips them to face it with resilience, skill, and courage. I like the saying, "Support the person, challenge the performance." That simple phrase captures a principle that works across all domains of life: leadership, parenting, coaching, and especially teaching. You can be fully compassionate toward individuals while being absolutely uncompromising in your expectations for their performance. In fact, the deepest form of respect is holding someone to a high standard because you believe they're capable of reaching it.

In recent years, I saw growing discomfort with the very idea of excellence—especially if it created distinction. Words like meritocracy became suspect. Grading practices softened. Student evaluations began to drive faculty behavior. Risk aversion took hold, especially among administrators. It became easier to celebrate effort than results. In some cases, institutions confused equity of opportunity with equality of outcome—forgetting that not everyone finishes at the same place, and that's not necessarily a failure. It's reality.

But true growth comes when people learn how to push themselves beyond what's comfortable. Excellence should be demanded, not merely encouraged. That's not elitism—it's stewardship. If we stop expecting great work from others, we eventually stop producing it ourselves.

This isn't a call to return to some mythical "good old days." We know more now about learning styles, trauma, and barriers to access than we once did—and we should use that knowledge to lift others. But we cannot let compassion morph into condescension. Students, like all people, need to know that their best is required, not optional. They need challenge as much as they need care.

Finishing well means standing firm for values that shaped lives long before the latest campus trend. It means rejecting false choices between achievement and empathy. We don't have to choose between helping people feel seen and helping them get better. We can do both. And in doing so, we honor the very purpose of education: to transform—not just inform—the lives of those we serve.