How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (review)

A very large book could be written about how professors think. Professor Lamont's instead narrows the perspective. She carefully and sensibly studies how groups of professors think when they convene to evaluate research proposals arriving at the offices of five different funding agencies. Her study is based on what those professors, all in the social sciences and the humanities, have been willing to tell her about the principles they employ and the biases that they may have. She reports that when proposals come to be judged, merit is sometimes, but not always, rewarded; that some disciplines (e.g., economics) have high degrees of consensus about intellectual merit and some (e.g., English) do not; that the American professoriate, largely made up of "liberal or progressive" individuals, again and again runs into the tension between excellence and diversity, meritocracy and equality; that there is no one standard of quality, appropriate to all disciplines, to be found; and that, when it comes down to ranking proposals, "strategic voting, horse-trading, self-interest, and idiosyncratic and inconsistent criteria all are unavoidable parts of the equation." This is not necessarily how professors think when doing their own work, but then that kind of thinking is even harder to describe than the kind done by professors collected in a room to parcel out prizes.