they might in fact have as good qualities as anybody else, they’re
going to be at a major disadvantage. Partly because for graduate
students, it’s very hard to evaluate their training other than by
these kinds of institutional means.Demonstrating the Matthew effect, according to which capital
goes to capital, being affiliated with a prestigious university can keep
a proposal above the bar.^40 A sociologist describes this phenomenon
while discussing a project by a scholar of China who teaches at the
University of Pennsylvania:
I know that Chinese literature at Penn is very highly regarded, and
she can’t be a dummy doing this particular kind of work, and it
was a beautiful proposal...This is a subject that if she had been
from some tiny little hole-in-the-wall college, it’s not likely, I don’t
think. For me, I mean. I don’t know about the others because we
didn’t really talk about these subtleties. But I know in my case,
when I see where she is, and she’s a professor, which they don’t
give out so much, I assume that this must be a very good person.Scholars working at elite universities have a more nuanced view of
differences among institutions at the top, particularly with respect to
how they prepare students for competitive fellowships. A historian of
China says:
People from Harvard get no advice of any kind, whereas at Stan-
ford they have to submit draft after draft and they get all these
comments...It’sliketeaching people to the test; it’s not neces-
sarily something we want to encourage...intheend,Iwant our
first emphasis to be along excellence. But we have to sort of add
points for certain kinds of diversity because in the end that pro-
motes more excellence than allowing this to devolve into the con-
trol of just a few institutions.Considering Interdisciplinarity and Diversity / 227