How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment

research topic and the significance of the likely impact of research findings—on academia as a whole, on one’s discipline, on kn ...

methodological approach they privilege (in a nutshell: reductivism versusverstehen), and whether they are grounded in “knowledge ...

interest here is not the detail of these distributions but the variety and range of panel members’ understandings of what consti ...

expertise regarding the current state of knowledge in a particular field and about what remains to be done. As one such expert e ...

lenses that one privileges. This too is influenced by personal taste. For many social scientists, “to go beyond the anecdotal,” ...

mental knowledge is illustrated by a panelist who, in citing John Maynard Keynes as one of his intellectual heroes, says of Keyn ...

itispreserved...that could be valuable.” One Marxist historian of post-colonialism admits that political considerations influenc ...

even though they were terrible proposals and everybody thought they were terrible proposals. He said, ‘Well, this is an importan ...

theory and data. This is a topic of concern for roughly half of all re- spondents, but nearly three-quarters of the social scien ...

panelists are most concerned with the theoretical dimension, echo- ing the assessment of intellectual significance. But here the ...

... I want a sense when I read a proposal that there is a mind select- ing theory and working theory and an aesthetic to which a ...

scholarship. According to one panelist, reflexivity involves being “self-conscious about the very nature of historical narrative ...

... [what] I don’t like to see is theory using people...scholars should be using the theory. An anthropologist sees the abuse of ...

both the scope of the project (including its timeline, plan of work, and budget) and the preparedness of the applicant (includin ...

that they are doing so, however. As an English professor notes, “intu- ition and flair” play important roles in judging excellen ...

seem to appeal to evanescent criteria as the inspiration strikes. This is probably because such considerations permeate academic ...

ity to treat the distinctiveness of particular cases, yet discern a larger transformation that transcended those particular area ...

smart thing to sort of [lead] the discussion...SoItakethis as a sign that he is really listening. He [is] extremely successful i ...

would be “an effort to submerge the individual style altogether. I want to have a strong personal voice.”^27 With respect to cul ...

audience, while non-interesting theories affirm certain assump- tions.”^32 An anthropologist’s description of a good proposal as ...