should be assessed.^2 Principles of justice such as merit, need, and dis-
tributive fairness are not all of the same order and they often clash
with one another. The French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Laurent
Thévenot, however, suggest that “compromise” can often be reached
between competing principles of legitimation.^3 How panelists bal-
ance excellence and diversity is a case in point, as we will see.
Tensions between excellence and diversity, and meritocracy and
democracy, remain at the center of debates about peer review. The
spatial dispersion of the American higher education system over a
very large territory, its institutional diversity (covering public and
private universities, as well as research universities, small liberal arts
colleges, and community colleges), and the sociodemographic diver-
sity of administrators, faculty, and students all keep these tensions
alive. Against such a diverse landscape, winners should be chosen
from a variety of groups and regions, and panelists should be some-
what representative of the broader population. For instance, winners
cannot all come from a few select institutions in the Northeast—this
would undermine the legitimacy of peer review as a meritocratic
and democratic system. Such a result would likely be viewed as an
organizational failure and/or as the outcome of elitism (opportunity
hoarding) or poor procedures. The democratic impulse attenuates
the steep institutional hierarchies that characterize American higher
education, but it does not impede an unconditional celebration of
excellence and meritocracy, which is viewed elsewhere as the expres-
sion of a certain social Darwinism.^4
Rewards and Challenges of Interdisciplinary Evaluation
Interdisciplinarity has many manifestations, including the degree to
which disciplinary boundaries are permeable and the extent to
which disciplines are conceptually integrated.^5 More specifically,
interdisciplinarity typically involves (1) developing conceptual links
204 / Considering Interdisciplinarity and Diversity