audience, while non-interesting theories affirm certain assump-
tions.”^32 An anthropologist’s description of a good proposal as one
“that seems intrinsically interesting to me” states: “I want the writer
to be able to convey that this is a project they’re interested in...It’sa
sense that it’s something important, because if it’s not important
enough to excite them, then why should they get funding?” “Boring,”
the opposite of “exciting,” is equated with repetition (a historian ob-
serves, “if a person has had some success at a certain kind of analysis,
[she should not] keep doing more of it”). But boringness can also
have a more damning connotation. One of the most antagonistic ex-
changes reported during the post-deliberation interviews with pan-
elists involved a historian who told a political scientist that proposals
from that field were “not so much difficult to evaluate, but just ex-
tremely, well, boring, and sort of filled with jargon. [They were] just
sort of artificially constructed...around these kind of criteria that
were intrinsically uninteresting.” Panel members’ preferences for “ex-
citing” work may indirectly advantage applicants (and their recom-
menders) from elite universities, to the extent that these individuals
are better positioned to tap widely shared understandings of what is
“cutting-edge,” “exciting,” or “boring” at any point in time. This pos-
sibility suggests one way in which informal criteria may work against
meritocratic evaluation.
In Chapter 4, we saw that panelists often use idiosyncratic stan-
dards of evaluation (an ex-tennis star was drawn to a proposal on the
body, a fan of modern dance to a study of dance, a bird enthusiast to
work on songbirds), but there are also important variations in how
panelists believe subjectivity—their own view of what is exciting ver-
sus boring—affects the evaluation. As Table 5.7 shows, humanists
cite work as “interesting” or “exciting” slightly more often than do
historians and social scientists. Humanists and more interpretative
social scientists (anthropologists and cultural historians) may be
more at ease with the role played by their subjectivity in evaluation.^33
After all, their interpretative power is their main analytical tool. In
Recognizing Various Kinds of Excellence / 193