portant enough to require that program officers and some panelists
repair relationships among evaluators.^33 Members of these panels re-
call them as “disappointing” and “nerve-racking,” or as “a panel that
turned into a two-day faculty meeting, which is not my idea of fun.”
Evaluators are particularly sensitive to the need to respect rules that
pertain to collegiality, the use of consistent standards, and the exclu-
sion of academic gossip from the deliberations.
Conflicts and collegiality. Across all panels, breaches of the rules of
deference to expertise and respect of disciplinary sovereignty are the
most frequent source of conflict and the most common threat to the
maintenance of collegiality. Failure to defer can be deeply troubling
to academics because so much of their self-identity is tied to their
role as privileged expert. An anthropologist admits deliberately with-
holding deference in the case of a “controversial” co-panelist when
that panelist “was, I thought, stepping outside of his field and into
mine.” Conflicts may also occur when a panelist is viewed as not up-
holding reasonable standards, despite having the relevant expertise.
A historian explains how an art historian
got noplace trying to sell [one of the proposals] to the rest of us.
This proposal was just not put together very carefully, and she
tried to argue that this is really a good person and that even if the
proposal wasn’t put together perfectly, [we should] think about it... you can throw your expertise out, but you do wind up having
to convince at least two other people.
Other panelists say that they refuse to defer to narrow expertise
(“I don’t bow to the white lab coat”). When a specialist focuses too
closely on detailed considerations that go beyond the general quality
of the proposal, other panelists may withhold deference because the
expert’s opinions make it more, not less, difficult to differentiate
138 / Pragmatic Fairness