even though they were terrible proposals and everybody thought
they were terrible proposals. He said, ‘Well, this is an important envi-
ronmental problem.’... It could be an important problem, but if
you don’t know how to study it, you’re not going to really help to
solve it.” Reaffirming the positivist credo, an economist believes good
scholarship is incompatible with advocacy: “The definition of an
academic is someone who doesn’t believe anything until [proven].
That begs the question of what are your hypotheses, what is your de-
fault position, which could be subject to all kinds of intrinsic, politi-
cal, ideological, or just national bias.” But a political scientist criti-
cizes what he calls this economist’s “pseudo-neutral” position of
objectivity. “His politics were different from mine and he was very
clear about, you know, ‘I don’t have a viewpoint. Either the person is
biased or unbiased.’ But he would pull the [neutrality] card when he
was reading proposals by lefties.” This political scientist questions
whether social significance is an appropriate criterion of evaluation.
He says: “I’ve never seen proposals that are socially useful...Idon’t
think it’s more significant that someone wants to work on refugee
camps in Rwanda...[oron]FrenchMaoism, because we really are
social scientists who are defining [ourselves] in a particular career
path, which is going to be about theory and teaching in universities.”
Methods and the proper use of theory. Four of the five funding pro-
grams I studied, as well as others, often mention methods as a crite-
rion of interest. Here again, there is a great deal of variation and am-
biguity regarding the aspects of methods that are emphasized. For
instance, the SSRC program mentions “responsiveness to method-
ological concerns” and “rationale for field work” as aspects of method
that proposals should address. The anonymous social science foun-
dation asks that proposals adopt a methodology appropriate for the
goal for the research. Given this variation, I focus here on a specific
aspect of methods that is correlated with quality: the articulation of
Recognizing Various Kinds of Excellence / 181