affirmative action because doing so seems ill-advised, like favoring
proposals that emanate from one’s own field. One respondent firmly
rejects factoring this diversification of topics into his own thinking
about what to fund:
There’s no way I will be able to figure that into my reading...I
don’t have information [to make such judgments]. Even if I have
the information, would I say, “OK, there are already ten people
who study South Korea and this proposal is well written, but there
are already ten people, and therefore I will grade it low?” [Doing
that] just doesn’t make sense to me.This scholar prefers to grade on quality only, but he admits that later
in the deliberative process, other factors are taken into consideration:
“Then we shuffle them and put them together...Atthat level, I’m
not judging them on the basis of quality, I’m just judging them on
the basis of representation, and I would feel extremely fine [about
it].” Separating the “real evaluation” from the negotiated rankings is
a conceptual framework that allows panelists to protect the sanctity
of the process (see Chapter 4).
Similarly, as a political scientist’s comments suggest, by combining
evaluative rationales—those related to expertise as well as to social
justice—panelists can preserve legitimacy while incorporating diver-
sity criteria. He describes his support for a proposal in archeology
this way:
[The proposal] was the only one I read in archeology, and so part
of it was simply trying to widen the spectrum of people [whom]
we funded. But it wasn’t just simply a quota system, getting an ar-
cheologist in the group photo. He made a pretty reasonable case
that when anthropologists and cultural historians have studied Is-
lam, they tended to derive most of their understandings about234 / Considering Interdisciplinarity and Diversity