was not privy to. She finds it disturbing that other panelists were re-
luctant to take a further look at the proposal, and that they seemed
to take for granted that it should not be funded. Reflecting on this
episode, she describes how the norms of collegiality limit what can
be said in the context of panel deliberations:
The one thing that I could not do is what I wanted to do...
[that] is, to just challenge [them]...Buthavingjustmetallfour
of these people for the first time, I didn’t want to question their
integrity. So I [made what] I thought was a somewhat eloquent
appeal based on the standard kinds of rationales...Iadmitted
maybe I had been duped and all of you have seen through this
hoax that he’s trying to pull on us, but I saw this as a very inter-
esting theme. And they admitted that, but they said, “It’s a cliché.”In reference to an allusion made by a panelist that the applicant
was able to secure large advances from publishers, she adds:
That kind of innuendo I thought was unfair. They know about
the proposal and what’s going on sort of behind the scenes and so
on, but they didn’t even want to discuss [the proposal]. We never
even discussed it, and I didn’t push it. First of all, I didn’t want to
say, “Look, I’m the only [person in the applicant’s field] here and
although this is treading on everybody’s turf, it seems like to me
you should [have] at least, you know, talk[ed] about this for five
minutes.”Nevertheless, this scholar is satisfied with the competition’s overall
outcome. She concludes, pragmatically, that “nothing is perfect,” and
that “human beings will find ways to bend rules, so the only thing
that can really help is just to try to get people to have high-level in-
tegrity and a sense of fairness.”
Pragmatic Fairness / 145