kind of complete absorption in his topic, and yet, an ability to com-
municate that absorption...Youfeltthat there’s a real love for the
work and that he has good ideas about it and that he knows a damn
lot about it.” The same esteemed historian quoted earlier, who was
also a member of this panel, describes one of the top candidates as
having great passion for his work, as well as great intellectual honesty
and integrity. “It was clear that he was someone who had attracted
extraordinary attention...Butwhatreallywasremarkable [was the]
sense that this is a young man who works on a rarefied topic, but he
was somebody you’d love to talk to.” Of a third candidate, he says:
What we found in talking to him was that there was a real kind of
depth and interest in what he said, a real passion, which was very
impressive...[Hehad] incredible intellectual commitment,
which had driven him in really a very short time to be an extraor-
dinary Slavic expert...[Hehad] a kind of non-career-oriented
fanatical energy.When I asked this historian “To what extent do you feel that you
are rewarding a moral self or a different intellectual identity?” he re-
sponded, “We’re unquestionably doing that. Unquestionably. A sub-
stantial part of the way the committee works is by its response to the
person, and what you very nicely call the ‘moral self.’ That is, these
are not quantifiable reactions. These are not reactions that you could
necessarily document. But there’s no question.”
Conclusion
This chapter explored the many meanings given to excellence by
panelists, as well as the relative salience of formal and informal crite-
ria of evaluation. Here I focused on differences between disciplinary
clusters—the humanities, the social sciences, and history—as op-
198 / Recognizing Various Kinds of Excellence