Chance. Although panelists view their deliberations as legitimate
and fair, they also acknowledge an element of randomness in the
outcomes. For instance, an English professor says, “Every panel kind
of gets its own rhythm going and there is a kind of randomness hav-
ing to do with who got picked to be on the panel, and the results
could be very different on another day...Iguess I hoped that all of
these people are applying to lots of different fellowships and the
cards will fall a different way for different people.” She does not de-
scribe the process as unfair, but neither does she see it as fully con-
trolled by the participants. This same panelist also notes that judging
academic excellence can be a frustratingly inexact undertaking:
I don’t put a huge amount of faith in my or anybody else’s ability
to measure it [excellence] exactly. [Just because of ] all the subjec-
tivity involved, [there are] field-by-field and even day-by-day or
minute-by-minute variations in what might count as excellence
for any given person or group of people. Certainly, so much is in-
volved in writing a proposal that has to do with cleverness, and
that could be totally different from the excellence of the end re-
sult. Things like that, I guess,... make me uncomfortable.Other panelists also readily admit the limitations of panels. An art
historian explains that because one cannot predict the composition
of the committee, “It is a tremendous game of chance that you can
manage to get something funded. That was my sense, that it’s a real
crap shoot of who will get the funding and who won’t.” A historian
maintains that the best projects do get rewarded, but “with mistakes”
because there is “bad judgment, dominating personalities and the re-
view [is done by] people who don’t see the true beauty of some proj-
ect over another. Mistakes are made. You’re reading a lot of these
things in between doing everything else.”
Pragmatic Fairness / 153