MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: ‘You rebel against a world that tells you mediocrity is good enough.’

Carlos Carvalho, president of the University of Austin, welcomed new students — this is the private school’s second year — with a speech defending inequality.

“Of course, all men are created equal,” said Carvalho, who was a professor of statistics in the business school at the University of Texas in Austin. “But all men are not the same. We have unequal curiosity, unequal intellect, unequal talent, unequal courage, unequal drive, unequal achievement.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, the great 19th century critic of American democracy, warned that “a dominating drive for equality suffocates the very people whose uncommon talent, courage, and vision could pull everyone else upward,” said Carvalho. He “famously observed that people in democracies might come to prefer equality in servitude to inequality in freedom. In the name of making all things equal, we end up equal only in mediocrity.”

If excellence were the norm we’d have to call it something else.