factor. In this organization, distributing awards across the associa-
tions’ various constituencies is a matter not only of fairness, but also
of organizational efficacy.
Other competitions also ask their panelists to take institutional
diversity into consideration when making awards, as this panelist in-
dicates:
We had the usual injunction from the program officer that we
should be careful to consider underrepresented institutions as one
extra plus in a proposal’s favor, though not to [the extent that it
would] cancel out [other negative attributes] if we thought the
proposal was weak. And equally, if we saw that we were over-re-
warding to any given institution, to recall that. He said the way we
should think about it is, we don’t want all the Michigan or Co-
lumbia people in one year; we want the best of their cohort. And
that means, of course, in a way, [that] the person [who’s] fifth in
line at Columbia in our imaginations might [have turned] out to
be first in line if they [had been] at, you know, SUNY–New Paltz.During post-deliberation interviews, more than a third of the
panelists mentioned institutional “affirmative action” as a criterion
of evaluation. Much as panelists are encouraged to follow the rule of
cognitive contextualism by applying the epistemological style most
appropriate to the applicant’s field (see Chapter 4), funding program
officers urge them to apply different standards depending on the re-
sources available at the applicant’s institution and the applicant’s ca-
reer stage. An English scholar working in women’s studies describes
how she factors in institutional criteria:
I’m going to cut someone less slack if they’re at Rutgers or some
other institution that has a lot of women’s studies, or at Mary-
land, but [if she’s] stuck at Northern Illinois or is out in Utah
where there is a lot of hostility to feminist issues...whereit’sConsidering Interdisciplinarity and Diversity / 225