Pete du Pont is the editor of IntellectualCapital.com. He is a former Republican governor and congressman from Delaware. His e-mail address is petedupont@intellectualcapital.com.

President Clinton was in Chicago the other day promoting his education formula: "Standards + Accountability = Excellence." But in fact his administration and all its agencies are moving in exactly the opposite direction, lowering standards and denigrating excellence at every opportunity.

Defining success down

Overwhelming evidence suggests that American government not only has abandoned the concept of excellence, but is affirmatively attempting to discredit and ultimately eliminate it as a core value of our society. For example:

• Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores were recently "re-centered" to give everyone a higher score. Then some questions on which boys do better than girls were eliminated, and sections where girls do better than boys added, in an effort to have the two genders test equally.

• Colleges have encouraged rampant grade inflation: 84% of Harvard students graduate with honors, and 41% of Princeton's grades are As. Meanwhile the college curriculum is watered down as required core curricula in literature and science are eliminated.

• Male West Point cadets are given three minutes and 20 seconds to complete the obstacle course. Women are given five minutes 30 seconds.

• The U.S. Forest Service was required by the courts to meet an employment quota of 43% female firefighters. There were not enough qualified female applicants to fill the requirements, so the Forest Service solicited applicants with a notice that "only unqualified applicants may apply."

Many culprits

These examples come from Martin L Gross' new book The End of Sanity, which catalogs a parade of anti-excellence policies and programs. This "onslaught of irrationality" is not the first mistaken direction in our history Gross points out; we have survived the Salem witch-hunts, Prohibition and McCarthyism.

But the current madness, to use Gross' word, is a far broader assault on our culture than any previous one. It is better funded -- by the government, foundations, and universities; more broadly enforced by the courts and agencies of government; and seems focused on destroying the concept of excellence as well as discouraging its pursuit. And it seems to be working.

In San Francisco, a federal court judge ruled that Chinese-American students must score 66 out of a possible 69 to be admitted to the Lowell High magnet school. Other ethnic groups needed a 59; Spanish surnamed students only a 56. Thus race is deemed more important than excellence. So, too, as we have seen in the Hopwood case in Texas, do many law schools create special acceptance pools for lower-scoring black and Hispanic students.

Federal policy

For a decade, until caught at it, the U.S. Department of Labor secretly "race-normed" employment test results by adjusting minority scores upwards. Thus the employers relying on the data thought they were hiring a person with one set of skills who actually possessed another, different set of abilities.

Good marks for what purpose?

The federal government's Civil Service exam long ago dropped arithmetic and algebra because they were too difficult for some applicants. The Foreign Service exam dropped section after section in a desperate effort to equalize white, black and female scores. But it was in vain; the State Department was ultimately ordered by a court "to pass applicants only according to their English Expression scores."

Over at the Pentagon, promotions are not to be made on the merits, because "Special permission will be required for the promotion of all white males without disability." In 1995 Navy Secretary John Dalton issued regulations that "Naval officers will be commissioned in a percentage approximately equal to the racial make-up of the population."

Hundreds of federal court decisions have undermined the pursuit of excellence. One example is Griggs v. Duke Power Company, in which the Supreme Court held that an employer's requirement of a high school diploma and passage of an intelligence test were evidence of hiring discrimination. A rational person might think that a high school diploma is a good thing, but not the federal courts. Another is the case of a New York judge ruling that black and white students must be disciplined for infractions of the rules in the same proportions. And of course two decades of school busing orders subordinated excellence to skin color in public education.

Finally, President Clinton's pending nominee to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, William Lann Lee, has filed (in his current civilian capacity) a California lawsuit to ban the use of achievement tests in college admissions. In other words, an academic institution should not be allowed to use academic standards in evaluating prospective students.

In the end, everybody loses

So where does all this denigration of excellence and politically-correct favoritism lead? First, to the balkanization of America into suspicious and competing ethnic camps. Gross cites the example of Torso del Junco, an Hispanic Vice Chairman of the Postal Board of Governors, who complains that blacks, who are but 10% of the population, unfairly hold 63% of postal worker jobs.

College degrees are devalued and grade transcripts suspect; hiring and promotion test data are unreliable; and worst of all, members of minority groups are taught by these tactics that work, excellence and learning skills are unimportant in life.

Several years ago my morning clock radio greeted me with the news that a Delaware school district had abolished the use of grades because "it makes every kid successful, not just the select kids who happened to get an A." Such feel-good nonsense is becoming the norm, not the exception, in schools across the country. Excellence may soon be a vague idea children heard their grandparents talk about.

Presidents may speak the rhetoric of excellence, but the substance of government policy in the last decade has been that the standards we use to measure it must be adjusted downwards to ensure that all groups of people are perceived as equally excellent.

As the reality of what government has wrought sinks in, the American people may begin to rethink this anti-excellence policy. For as Winston Churchill once remarked, "the American people will always do the right thing -- after they have tried everything else."