Anyone who has applied for fellowships or other competitive support or awards will find this item of interest. An excerpt of the findings:
In deliberations, many panelists admit to forming alliances with like-minded scholars to back or oppose proposals, and to using "strategic" voting, in which they may go along with one grant to win support for another. Many admit to "high balling" proposals that they like, giving them ranks that are higher than deserved, as a means of keeping a proposal alive in the competition. But relatively few would admit to "low balling" and there appears to be a general consensus against it....
[One] timing issue involves the inevitable plane to catch. One panel Lamont observed simply didn't award all the fellowships it could have because the reviewers wanted to leave for the airport....
[W]hen it comes to an affinity for work that is similar to their own or that reflects personal interests having nothing to do with scholarship, many applicants benefit in a significant way. In a passage that may be one of the most damning of the book, Lamont writes: "[A]n anthropologist explains her support for a proposal on songbirds by noting that she had just come back from Tucson, where she had been charmed by songbirds. An English scholar supports a proposal on the body, tying her interest to the fact that she was an elite tennis player in high school. A historian doing cross-cultural, comparative work explicitly states that he favors proposals with a similar emphasis. ... Yet another panelist ties her opposition to a proposal on Viagra to the fact that she is a lesbian....
When peer reviewers talk about excellence in their deliberations, Lamont writes, they frequently link their opinions on applicants' character to their proposals (without much link to what grant competitions claim to be about). For example, she writes that there are frequent attempts to bolster proposals from "courageous risk-takers," or to reject ideas from "lazy conformists." People also reference, in positive ways, such qualities as "determination," "humility" and "authenticity," she writes....
UPDATE: Richard Chappell has interesting commentary.
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