knowledge, and market pressures.^48 Because so many social scientists
and humanists are liberal or progressive, they are also concerned
that the elite not be favored at the expense of meritocracy. As an
anthropologist puts it, “Those who have famous advisers and are
at [the] top three or four universities will be ranked higher than peo-
ple who aren’t, even if the quality of the proposal is the same. It
seems to me there’s far too much elitism and just [a] sort of favorit-
ism.”
Perhaps there is something distinctively American in how these
tensions are experienced, something that is linked to the sheer size
of the higher education system, to its spatial dispersion, and to its
institutional diversity and its uniquely wide-ranging sociodemo-
graphic variations. That American panelists deploy so much energy
to elaborate positions with regard to diversity that are nuanced and
compatible indicates how aware they are of the sheer complexity of
the academic world they inhabit. Their attentiveness to the issue
contrasts with the situation in most European countries, where
higher education systems are smaller and more homogeneous, and
thus less subject to a complicated weighing of nontraditional consid-
erations like diversity when academic achievements are evaluated.
In these countries, considerations such as spreading the riches across
types of institutions do not arise to the same degree. For example,
the British reform of evaluation processes imposed during the 1980s
promoted a straightforward application of meritocratic standards
that allowed no consideration of needs and distributive fairness,
in response in part to the historically ascriptive system of distri-
bution that favored elite institutions such as Oxford and Cam-
bridge.^49
Despite its democratic impulse, the sheer size of the American sys-
tem, along with the entrenched hierarchy of institutions that charac-
terize it, may doom efforts to free it of ongoing elitism. A British
236 / Considering Interdisciplinarity and Diversity