elists do pay careful attention to, the ones that lead them to assign
great legitimacy to the outcome of their deliberations, are informal. I
describe these rules as “customary” because they are not formally
spelled out and are instead created and learned by panelists during
their immersion in collective work.^8 Some of these rules are meant to
standardize procedures, and they promote the bracketing of personal
interest (for example, norms for abstaining from decisions involving
one’s students). Others, such as deferring to expertise, operate as
ritual and are used to separate the “sacred” (excellence) from the
“impure” (self-interest, idiosyncratic preferences, narrowness, disci-
plinary parochialism, and so on). As one panelist explains, replying
to a question about how he thought about his experience, “I think it
has to do with almost sacred value, with value that transcends insti-
tutions, individuals, networks, and things like that. What you’re try-
ing to achieve is something that goes beyond individual interest and
perspective.”
In a general sense, all the informal rules that guide deliberations
are deeply familiar to panelists. In the process of doing their jobs
as academics, panel members become accustomed to making judg-
ments; they evaluate students’ and colleagues’ performance, manu-
scripts for publication, and tenure cases. What distinguishes the as-
sessments that academics perform on grant and fellowship panels
from those that occur in departmental evaluations is context. As
we saw in Chapter 2, panelists are not engaged in a sustained rela-
tionship with one another; nor do they have to share the lives of
awardees, as they do with newly hired colleagues or graduate stu-
dents who have been admitted to their department. As a conse-
quence of the limited personal stake in the outcome and of the lack
of time, they are not likely to mobilize their networks to gather in-
formation on the personal qualities of the candidate, as they might
do (in some instances) when serving on recruitment committees.^9 At
the same time, since universalism is essential to the legitimacy of the
Pragmatic Fairness / 111