How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment

among historians and social scientists. Mentions of ethno-racial di- versity are roughly equal across disciplinary clusters. Ove ...

bring out the best work. “It’s important for foundations such as these to encourage the production of as wide a range of knowled ...

that some “get in by merit,” while others do so “by quota.”^24 The case of peer review suggests another perspective, one where c ...

Panelists are aware that they apply different standards as the group’s deliberations progress beyond the few proposals for which ...

ure everybody. And that’s a good thing...It’skind of like a pop- ular feel-good urge to say, “Let’s root for the underdog and ho ...

men’s studies proposals at a time when these organizations were not inclined to fund them. She explains that she “would not argu ...

panelist explicitly aims to ensure that diversity in all its manifesta- tions is represented among the winners: “My agenda was t ...

In my university, we are about to make an offer to someone, a woman from India who’s from a high caste and probably grew up with ...

stance, a widely cited study of peer-reviewed evaluations of post- doctoral research applications shows that reviewers consisten ...

der, by discipline, [by being] at research universities, and so forth?” This panelist also recalls the panel as a whole being se ...

books that use qualitative data.^36 A panel that favors quantitative work over qualitative work could thus put women at a disadv ...

factor. In this organization, distributing awards across the associa- tions’ various constituencies is a matter not only of fair ...

open hostility that may even sometimes involve violence, I think, man, this person has really worked to get as far as she has. A ...

they might in fact have as good qualities as anybody else, they’re going to be at a major disadvantage. Partly because for gradu ...

For an English scholar, the solution is to fund “people from other than Ivy League or Research I institutions, people from sort ...

whoever would probably be better off, and it’s kind of silly to try to amend that. Self-interest influences the position that so ...

touched areas seems to me a good thing to do. Some of the appli- cations that I remember being very beautifully crafted fell low ...

influence of critical theory remains pronounced). Of course, the de- velopment of women’s studies has also had an important, ind ...

scholarship, proposals that receive such support can be construed as substandard by unsympathetic panelists. A political scienti ...

conducted—a position that gives greater latitude to feminist-ori- ented scholarship.^45 A different logic is applied to substant ...