modernity and the media in the United States, he mentioned to the
group that he had done work on the period covered by the proposal,
and that for this reason he was particularly well positioned to assess
its contribution. “I think I had expert advice here, and I think that’s
why she got [the funding], because I had expert advice,” he con-
cludes.
Panelists defer to the expertise of others because the situation re-
quires that they take positions on topics about which they know very
little. An anthropologist says: “Philosophy, I didn’t feel at all as if I
were competent to evaluate those proposals. [I don’t mention this]
to say this is good or this is not good; I just did not know what was
up with them. And in those cases, I always deferred to the people
who did have some kind of expertise in that field.”
Hearing the opinions of experts is also essential when panelists
are comparing proposals that speak to a wide range of unfamiliar
topics. An English professor who “tended to give high marks to
some proposals [where] I had no education about the field” counts
on the corrective influence of more knowledgeable panelists. While
he found the proposed work simply “exciting,” “some other panelist
would be able to say very quickly, ‘This is not original work, you
know.’ There’d be no way for me to know that in advance.” Similarly,
a historian notes that a proposal “looks good until somebody says
there’s a whole literature that you cannot reasonably be expected to
know.” Particularly when listening to someone who “comes in ex-
tremely expert and careful and [is] a person I respect a lot,” this his-
torian finds it prudent to defer. “[If this expert] says, ‘... this is really
a fairly banal proposal,’ then I just sort of say that must be true.”
The most common form of deference involves what I call respect-
ing disciplinary sovereignty. Panelists’ opinions generally are given
more weight according to how closely the proposal overlaps “their”
field. Another historian spells out this culture of disciplinary de-
ference:
118 / Pragmatic Fairness