the least, isn’t perfect.” An English professor reflects on her decision
making in the final stages of deliberations this way:
What I decided about two-thirds of the way through the meeting
is that there was one file I was going to go to the mat for around
these issues [of applied knowledge]. I decided it was going to re-
quire me to figure out what I’d have to lose in order to get this
one...Ithink that the process of these committee meetings is
about negotiations. And at the end of the day, it seems to me one
may need to think about these files in terms of categories...you
kind of [have] to figure out which of these files in these particular
categories is going to be the one that I can win. People aren’t go-
ing to want to concede everything; everybody has their thing they
want to win. And so if I’m going to try to win on these two fronts,
I’m going to have to put my weight behind the strongest one and
kind of lose the others.Horse-trading is described here as part of the ordinary order of
things once the consensus proposals have been funded. A historian
provides a very similar view, while also stressing the importance of
negotiation. “There was one [proposal] that I didn’t like and argued
against a couple times earlier in the day. At one point I realized that
the other four people liked that and so I said ‘Look, I’m probably
wrong. I still don’t like it but I’m probably wrong, so let’s put it on
the list.’ And I think to some degree, just politically, that gave me
some credibility when I wanted something else...because I showed
good will.”
The dynamics of ranking are such that many judgments are rela-
tional and conjectural, and it is in this context that panelists come to
think strategically about what they can realistically accomplish. This
is evidenced in the comments of another historian, as he explains
why he deliberately chose not to veto a project he opposed:
124 / Pragmatic Fairness