panelist notes how American students from better universities are
privileged:
They’ve got all the best professors anyway. For example, people
talk about, “Well, you know, so and so is our supervisor, so that
would give me confidence that the work will be done even despite
the doubts about it,” and that’s so inside-knowledge. But it’s also
an assumption about the role between the supervisor and the
student.Nevertheless, the claims regularly made by lower-rank universities
for privileging justice-inflected alternative principles of distribution
are certainly a force for social change. This is the case notably within
professional associations such as the American Sociological Associa-
tion, where elections to important committees make room for vari-
ous subcategories of candidates, including sociologists working in
four-year institutions, as well as applied sociologists. The response
to a push from within the American Political Science Association
for a similar approach, however, is a vivid reminder that dilemmas
of democracy are handled very differently across disciplines. Seg-
ments of the APSA’s top leadership resisted this suggestion, prefer-
ring to maintain the status quo, whereby members simply rubber-
stamp a list of nominees chosen by members of the discipline’s
elite—although this list does include individuals teaching in a range
of types of institutions. These two different disciplinary responses,
which continue to generate much angst within segments of each dis-
cipline, clearly demonstrate how meritocracy and democracy often
operate as antinomic principles within the context of American higher
education. That academics are struggling so hard—or not struggling
at all—to reconcile them speaks volumes about their importance as
buttresses to the structure of our academic world. In addition, that
Considering Interdisciplinarity and Diversity / 237