Not surprisingly, given the emergent quality of the standards of
evaluation for interdisciplinary genres, panelists readily fall back on
existing disciplinary standards to determine what should and should
not be funded. This may mean that at the end of the day, interdisci-
plinary scholarship is evaluated through several disciplinary lenses.
That is the conclusion my colleagues and I reached in our study of
cognitive contextualization and the production of fair judgments
within interdisciplinary panels.^16 Of course, more research is needed
in this area, particularly concerning the creation and evaluation of
shared interdisciplinary cognitive platforms.^17 We also need to un-
derstand better the weak institutionalization of interdisciplinary cri-
teria of evaluation in the face of considerable available funding, gov-
ernmental mandates for interdisciplinary research, and industry’s
appreciation of it. Is ambiguity inherent to the genre?
While “good” interdisciplinary evaluation calls for a very distinct,
if rare, combination of expertise, “good” diversity evaluation raises
questions of a different order. These have to do with fundamental
principles—how to reconcile evaluation based on merit, on the one
hand, and evaluation based on needs and distributive justice, on the
other.
Including Diversity Criteria
Many studies demonstrate the relatively few women and minority
faculty members in the most prestigious levels of academia—in par-
ticular, tenured positions at research universities that have high lev-
els of influence and productivity.^18 Although faculty diversity is in-
creasing, unequal access to higher education continues to affect the
pipeline.^19 It is against this background that diversity considerations
affect all forms of selection in American higher education, ranging
from law school admissions and department tenure decisions, to the
awarding of fellowships.
Just as with interdisciplinarity, some of the funding agencies in-
Considering Interdisciplinarity and Diversity / 211