Six Criteria for Recognizing Excellence
Chapter 2 described the formal criteria that funding agencies ask
panelists to consider in making awards (see especially Table 2.1).
Chapter 3 provided a general analysis of disciplinary peculiarities
with respect to what constitutes excellence. Here, I identify trends in
panelists’ understanding and use of evaluative criteria by regrouping
these disciplines into the standard categories of humanities and so-
cial sciences, but I continue to treat history as its own category,
standing between the humanities and social sciences. Table 5.1 shows
the relative salience of formal criteria (defined as the number of
times that respondents mention using each) across these disciplinary
clusters.
The six criteria do not each receive the same weight. Originality,
for example, is more heavily weighted than is feasibility (see Table
5.1.) Conflicts emerge over how much weight should be given to
each criterion—to rigor versus innovation, for instance. One histo-
rian describes how he supported a proposal on what seemed to be
a “cool idea”: “My attraction to it was that I just could see the
book, you know, and I was thinking this would be a really excellent,
readable, teachable book, around a compelling idea...[Itwould]
produce a kind of quality different than the usual more kind of
massaged and theoretically sophisticated and careerist [project]. You
know, I mean, it was something outside.” An economist, who puts
much more emphasis on methods and rigor, strongly opposed this
proposal, despite its innovative character. Thus different standards
are applied to the same proposals. Moreover, proposals do not win
or lose for the same reasons. The social sciences and the humani-
ties make up a multifaceted academic world; there is no single, inte-
grated disciplinary hierarchy. Different pieces of scholarship shine
under different lights. Many cross-cutting scholarly approaches
partly reinforce one another, but also sometimes cancel one another
166 / Recognizing Various Kinds of Excellence