For an English scholar, the solution is to fund “people from other
than Ivy League or Research I institutions, people from sort of smaller
colleges, who might not have had access to research support and
might be read as ‘under-published.’ Also people from different parts of
the country, people from ethnic studies, if possible, that kind of thing.”
Panelists also sometimes suggest limiting fellowships for appli-
cants who have already received them in the past. This is a sensitive
issue, in part because track record is read as indicating excellence,
and in part because it raises the issue of need. Assessing need is
largely framed as illegitimate—panelists do not even mention it as
a consideration. Still, tensions exist around whether it should be
factored in. The legitimacy of need, like that of institutional af-
firmative action, turns on distributive justice, which is a different
principle of allocation than that of merit.^41 At the center of the de-
bates is whether scholars who have access to many resources should
get more, or whether those who have access to very little should be
advantaged. One panelist, a sociologist, argues strongly against insti-
tutional affirmative action because he believes that the distribution
of the cultural and social capital that come with institutional affilia-
tion cannot easily be manipulated:
The chair of our panel seemed to be quite keen on [promoting]
underrepresented institutions. I tend not to be all that sympa-
thetic to that argument. It’s stupid to be prejudiced against, say,
people who are pursuing advanced graduate work at Oklahoma
State. But it may very well be that, for example, just to pick a topic
out of the hat, if you want to do a study of [a] nineteenth-century
French critique of bureaucracy,... maybe it’s not the best place to
pursue that kind of work, given that there aren’t adequate faculty
members, you know, infrastructures or what not. So by and large,
[it’s] an unfortunate fact of life that other things being equal,
someone who went to Stanford and studied with Keith Baker or228 / Considering Interdisciplinarity and Diversity