How Professors Think. Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment Harvard

摘要

Michele Lamont's How Professors Think is an empirical study of peer review panels that evaluate applications for research fellowships. She conducted eighty-one interviews with panel participants as well as with officials of five U.S. American research funding organizations. All these organizations award funds to scholars from the social sciences and humanities. Panels had to rank the submissions according to criteria of excellence as spelled out by the respective funding organization. The exact meaning of these criteria, however, is unclear and contested: not all panelists and officials agree on what terms like, for example, clarity, originality, significance, or quality mean. In other words, these terms do not per se allow for clear and transparent decisions on how to rank scholarly work. It takes a process of group discussion for panel members to reach an agreement about which proposal is excellent and which is not, thereby continuously reasoning about excellence, negotiating its actual content, and weighing up its different criteria (clarity, significance, etc.). This situation is aggravated when, as was the case with the panels Lamont studied, the panels are set up by scholars coming from different disciplines.