out. One anthropologist directly connects the valuing of a wide range
of topics and types of scholarship with different standards of excel-
lence. She traces this connection to the emergence of feminism in
academia, and to the awareness of how power relationships shape
criteria. “[There is] more than one model of excellence,” she asserts.
This view will be confirmed throughout this chapter, as we examine
the main criteria of evaluation, starting with clarity and “quality.”
Clarity and “Quality”
Only the ACLS, WWNFF, and SSRC specify clarity as a formal crite-
rion of evaluation, but it is often the first characteristic that panelists
mention when describing how they separate the wheat from the
chaff. Although clarity is of greater importance to historians and hu-
manists than to social scientists, in the aggregate, 61 percent of pan-
elists who were asked to name their most important criteria for mea-
suring excellence mentioned clarity, defining it in terms as varied as
luminescence, transparency, precision, analytical articulation, crisp-
ness, and tightness (see Table 5.1.) That it is not explicitly mentioned
by more reviewers indicates how taken-for-granted it is as a sine qua
non for excellence. Particularly with respect to the proposal, form is
Recognizing Various Kinds of Excellence / 167Table 5.1Number of panelists mentioning each criterion, by
disciplinary cluster
Criterion
Humanities
(N=22)History
(N=20)Social sciences
(N=29)Total
(N=71)
Clarity 15 (68%) 16 (80%) 12 (41%) 43 (61%)
“Quality” 9 (41%) 8 (40%) 15 (52%) 32 (45%)
Originality 18 (82%) 19 (95%) 26 (90%) 63 (89%)
Significance 19 (86%) 19 (95%) 27 (93%) 65 (92%)
Methods 9 (41%) 11 (55%) 21 (72%) 41 (58%)
Feasibility 10 (45%) 11 (55%) 15 (52%) 36 (51%)
Note:A “mention” occurs when a criterion is used during the interview.