How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment

In anthropology, contested notions of excellence reflect the influ-
ence of post-structuralism, which emerges particularly in debates
over whether excellence resides in the object being evaluated or is
located in the eye of the beholder. A cultural anthropologist who
teaches at a top university articulates the field’s multilayered concep-
tion of excellence:

There [are] places where everybody’s in agreement, where this is

excellence that’s recognizable no matter what your field is. And

then there are cases where excellence is something that’s negoti-

ated within the group of evaluators, who are subjective. But then

there’s something else, too, which is what you might want to think

of as inter-subjectivity between the individual reviewer and the

writer, so it’s more of an author-reader relationship in that kind

ofcollaborativerecognition...Idon’twant to say that there are

objective standards of quality, but there are certainly conventions

of excellence that a good proposal pretty much, no matter what

the field, can engage with.

Asked if she believes in academic excellence, she answers, “I sup-
pose I’d have to say that philosophically and intellectually, probably
not, but in some sort of visceral way, probably so...Iwasjustread-
ing political philosophy of post-structuralist sorts, and so I know
that you can’t really, that excellence is constructed. And yet, you
know, constructed or not, it’s still, it’s the discipline that we’re all
kind of disciplined in. So it operates as if it were something real.”
Yet for other anthropologists, the consensus that emerges from the
independent ranking that panelists produce prior to the group meet-
ing confirms that quality is intrinsic to the proposal. As one inter-
viewee says:

A matrix was prepared which rated [proposals] by total score [i.e.,

the sum of the scores given by each panelist]. It was notable that

94 / On Disciplinary Cultures