whoever would probably be better off, and it’s kind of silly to try
to amend that.Self-interest influences the position that some scholars take on the
question of institutional affirmative action. A panelist who teaches
at UCLA believes that the funding competitions are biased against
public school students:
At UCLA you see a lot of bright people, but they’re coming out of
miserable school systems...Theyarenotgoingtorisetothetop
in a competition like SSRC...[neither will] somebody who goes
through a program that doesn’t have a rigorous sort of theoretical
background. So that sort of biases it against like Big Ten type schools,
the UC system as a public school system. But it puts a lot more
emphasis I think on the very schools that keep getting funded—
Chicago, Harvard, the Ivy League schools, as well as Berkeley.Affirmative Action Regarding Research Topics
Two of the funding competitions privilege specific types of research:
that emanating from the field of women’s studies (the WWNFF
competition); and comparative work (the SSRC’s International Dis-
sertation Field Research competition). These competitions instruct
panelists to consider potential contributions to these specific areas
when evaluating proposals. But beyond these explicit and organiza-
tionally specific foci, some panelists favor topics of scholarship that
they particularly value, and which they believe are neglected. This is
what I call “substantive affirmative action.” A political scientist who
promotes it in the name of originality says:
Non-Western subjects, we felt an obligation to give those a kind
of extra advantage...Opening up scholarship in relatively un-Considering Interdisciplinarity and Diversity / 229