We will see that in the world of funding panels, as in the world of
American higher education, diversity takes many forms and comes
in many hues. Yet while public debates center mainly on the place of
racial and gender diversity in higher education, panelists assign the
most weight to institutional and disciplinary diversity. Various types
of diversity are valued as an intrinsic good that contributes to the
overall quality of the research environment. Concerns for represen-
tation and efficacy (being truthful to the organizational mission) are
factored into arguments in favor of diversity, but diversity is also
valued as a component of excellence and as a means of redressing
past injustices, leveling the playing field, and shaping the academic
pipeline.
The five competitions under consideration are multidisciplinary
in the sense that they aim to fund proposals emanating from a range
of disciplines and their panel members are drawn from various dis-
ciplines (see Chapter 2). But these competitions all fund, in varying
proportions, both disciplinary and interdisciplinary proposals. Only
three of the sponsors explicitly encourage interdisciplinary scholar-
ship.^1 As for diversity, while some competitions, such as that of the
American Council for Learned Societies, specify that “minorities
and other groups are encouraged to apply,” others do not mention
diversity criteria in their guidelines to panelists or applicants. Such
considerations have become part of the taken-for-granted standards
used for evaluation across a range of settings in American higher ed-
ucation; and most of the funding organizations I studied promote
diversity as part of their broader organizational mandate. Not sur-
prisingly, then, when reporting arguments made in favor and against
proposals, the interviewees routinely refer to the influence of various
kinds of diversity.
Critics of affirmative action believe that factoring in diversity
poses challenges related to fairness. As explained by the political the-
orist Michael Walzer in his classicSpheres of Justice,justice is not one
idea but several, because there is no single criterion by which justice
Considering Interdisciplinarity and Diversity / 203