seem to appeal to evanescent criteria as the inspiration strikes. This
is probably because such considerations permeate academic life, mo-
tivating scholars as they go about doing research and interacting
with colleagues. Who is smart and less smart, who has a sense of an-
alytical elegance and flair, who is boring or pedestrian, who is a
mensch and who is not to be trusted—such preoccupations are rou-
tine for academics. Thus it is hardly surprising that panelists factor
in these concerns when they find themselves locked in a room for a
few hours, or a few days, and asked to make judgments on their
peers. Far from corrupting the process of identifying and rewarding
excellence, I see these considerations as intrinsic to it. In any case,
they are unavoidable.
Divining signs of intelligence. As Table 5.7 shows, three-quarters of
the respondents mention at least one dimension of “signs of intelli-
gence” in discussing their assessment of proposals. An applicant’s in-
telligence, according to an English professor, can be seen in the “sub-
tlety and complexity with which the project is framed.” For this
panelist, intelligence is an “ability to understand and present com-
plex ideas in an orderly fashion, to balance potentially conflicting
positions or information and present that kind of complication clearly.”
The importance that evaluators attach to signs of intelligence is fur-
ther indicated by the descriptions they provide of their intellectual
heroes, who tend to be scholars who excel at making sense of com-
plex phenomena. For example, a political scientist who singled out
the political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset emphasizes the com-
plexity of Lipset’s thought: “He’s a primitive genius. He’s able to pick
up an enormously complex literature and he’s able to take an angle
on it that somehow captures some essential elements of those ques-
tions in the literature...Hecankind of figure out what is going on.
He can smell it.” Similarly, a historian describes Robert Palmer’s
bookThe Age of the Democratic Revolutionas impressive for “its abil-
Recognizing Various Kinds of Excellence / 189