“theory wars” have been fought, are more likely to take a relativistic
stance toward evaluation, as well as to have a weaker consensus on
what defines quality.
Disciplinary cultures of excellence are also likely to be influenced
by demographic factors: these reveal patterns of growth and decline,
which may reverberate on levels of consensus within a discipline.
Over the past thirty years, students have fled the humanities, as well
as the softer social sciences, for more practical majors such as busi-
ness and computer science.^15 Figure 3.1 presents data on the number
of PhDs awarded per field between 1975 and 2005. English, history,
and political science experienced an important decline in degrees
granted between 1975 and 1985. After 1995, these disciplines re-
bounded (to varying degrees) and stabilized or slightly increased un-
til 2005. In the late 1970s, economics suffered from a less acute de-
cline than the other fields (except for anthropology), and has shown
continuous growth since, as have history and political science. Per-
haps not coincidentally, economics and history are the two disci-
plines where scholars appear to have the most consensus concerning
what defines quality. English, the only field to show a decline in
PhDs granted between 1995 and 2005, is also the discipline where
the very concept of academic excellence has come under the greatest
attack. Of course, figures on the number of PhDs granted per disci-
pline are not a conclusive indicator of the vitality or status of fields,
and I do not present these data as evidence of a one-to-one corre-
spondence between disciplinary status, market-strength, and con-
sensus.^16 I do, however, see the association illustrated by Figure 3.1 as
highlighting one of a constellation of conditions that sustain—or
fragment—disciplinary consensus regarding the pursuit of knowl-
edge and the associated question of how to define and evaluate excel-
lence.^17
In the context of peer review panels, one of the most vivid indica-
tors of disciplinary differences is the place that evaluators accord to
subjectivity in the pursuit of knowledge. Here the gulf of mutual in-
On Disciplinary Cultures / 59