and we had like three or four proposals to go. [Some] were sort of
on the fence, [and] there were a few people who were pushing
hard. At this point there was no displacement effect because you
knew that if you funded this person, it wasn’t going to displace
somebody else who might have more [merit]. And so I think they
might have just simply said, “Look, you know, it’s four-thirty on
Saturday. We’re at the end of the day. I’m tired. You feel passion-
ate. I don’t really care.” I don’t think [the last award] was [made]
on the merit.Timing and sequence are crucial because each award is made
without knowing for sure that there aren’t other, more deserving, ap-
plications farther down in the pile. Reconsideration at the end is al-
ways a possibility, but it is somewhat unlikely given that it requires
the energy-consuming challenge of refocusing the panelists’ atten-
tion on the specifics of a particular proposal. As one anthropologist
explained: “I feel that if the meeting had gone another day, and if we
had been allowed to pull people out of the ‘yes’ list and change our
minds, there might have been six or seven or eight switches.”
Panelists’ intellectual exhaustion after two days of intense work
also affects how they carry out their task, especially near the end. In
particular, during the two days they spend together, panelists often
develop a common sense of humor, a group culture of sorts, which
may disrupt the seriousness of the deliberations. An art historian ob-
serves, “I think as people get more and more tired, certain topics that
emerged, people made fun of and became sort of the butt of the joke
right through to the very end.”^41 Interestingly, because of time pres-
sures (panelists had flights to catch), one of the panels I studied did
not distribute all the fellowships it had at its disposal. This is a strong
reminder that despite its many otherworldly aspects, judging aca-
demic excellence is a process shaped by real-world constraints.
Pragmatic Fairness / 155