tegic voting is taking into consideration only the proposal itself, not
the context of evaluation. While some panelists take pride in aiming
for this goal, abstracting proposals from the context of evaluation is
a social anomaly, and it is not easily or often achieved.
If strategically assigning a high rank to a proposal (“high-balling”)
is considered permissible, low-balling is not, because it unfairly pe-
nalizes better proposals. In fact, low-balling is the only form of stra-
tegic voting that panelists describe as illegitimate. A historian, who
suspected a philosopher of deliberately assigning low ranks, explains
the problem:
I was a little bit concerned about [this guy’s] rankings because he
gave a lot of “threes.” The problem with “threes” is they pretty
much end a proposal. My sense in reading the instructions that
we received is that all of the proposals had already gone through
pre-screening and between fifty and sixty percent had already
been eliminated, so that this was really the kind ofcrème de la
crème... I can’t impute intention, but the effect was three simply
meant the end of a proposal. At a certain point I guess I began to
feel...“Isthis a sort of political [that is, strategic] evaluation?”Strategic voting and horse-trading are particularly crucial at the
end of panel deliberations, when panelists are parceling out the last
available fellowships, choosing among proposals that each are flawed,
but differently so, and thus are not easily made commensurate. This
eleventh-hour context forces panelists to engage in calculation and
quid pro quo to a degree that may have been unnecessary or un-
thinkable at an earlier point. (The influence of timing on proposal
evaluation is discussed at greater length later in this chapter.) A his-
torian explains that “one of the reasons I honestly don’t mind mak-
ing compromises is because [in the final stages, when] you’re danc-
ing through all these [deals], you realize your [own] judgment, to say
Pragmatic Fairness / 123