For an English professor, these elements of chance work against
the more innovative proposals:
The alternates, sometimes to me they’re the ones you really like to
see sort of get in because they’re just quirky enough, they’re just
odd enough, and they’re just daring enough that they really might
come to something so unexpected and unusual and provocative.
But those are the ones that really are subject to these other vari-
ables, such as: What are the interactions among the members of
the committee? Where are the proposals alphabetically? Or in
terms of [the order in which they] are being decided? So it’s by no
means an objective process.For a historian, luck is especially important in discussions of the
more creative proposals, for which usual standards do not apply and
which require collective risk-taking: “We have to make decisions that
are based on these intangibles about creativity and pushing the enve-
lope, and those are harder, more intuitive, as you probably noticed.
You can’t say this person’s grades are higher or their letters are better;
you can’t use those criteria.”
The sequence and time at which proposals are discussed are also
crucial. At the end of the day, people are more pressed, eager to go
home, and more disposed, of necessity, to negotiate and reach
quicker judgments on each proposal under consideration. In addi-
tion, the more contentious proposals often are discussed at the end,
after all the easier cases have been dealt with. A political scientist de-
scribes the context that emerges at this final stage:
This is one of the last proposals we talked about, one of the very
last. At that point we knew we had many grants to give away, and
we also knew that we were at number twenty-four or twenty-five,154 / Pragmatic Fairness