How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment

have turned more and more to doing historical work or social sci- ence work and so it’s been a matter of a kind of internal self ...

stand on the theory, how theoretical you want to be, or how for- mal your orientation is. We can’t mount as convincing a case an ...

readability. A different English professor points out, “Literary studies can just get too fancy, too complicated. I really enjoy ...

history, and certain forms of maybe philosophy. But when it comes to literature, there is absolutely no [a priori prestige]... [ ...

I could imagine a situation where I might want to say, “I don’t be- lieve in academic excellence.”... What people usually [respo ...

A philosopher perceives English as more acutely affected by gener- ational differences than other disciplines: “It seems to me t ...

ment about what constitutes quality and how to recognize it. The contrast they draw with English literature could not be starker ...

idea of “what’s new here?” Research is oriented toward getting re- sults. Theory is useful, but not paramount. Those disciplines ...

in traditionally less favored geographical areas. Were the discipline smaller, it might be characterized by more conflict. In se ...

eye of the interpreter is given much more power, comparable to an art or literary critic who looks at a painting or feels the po ...

also often intersect with each other...Ithink that [the] sides carry a kind of stereotype of each other. I definitely see myself ...

[You have] very painful debates, which run on a kind of rough generational fault line...:Anoldergenerationwhodidpolitical, econo ...

cross, check, discussion, advocacy, persuasion, settling on a consen- sus, balancing.” Still, the affirmative response of a very ...

of others in very significant ways, perhaps branching out, expand- ing other important work. Anthropology’s Fragile Boundaries A ...

nent disagreement concerning “just about everything.” According to Geertz, “One of the advantages of anthropology as a scholarly ...

ondly, absolutely shocked that nobody else ever encouraged him to go read any of that stuff or talk with any of the people who w ...

set of evaluative criteria common in anthropology that may not be applicable to other disciplines: [These non-anthropologists] d ...

disciplinary work to the bad guys...Whatbothers me most is a certain kind of political sanctimoniousness, more even than a kind ...

brace of multi-sited research.^48 A sociologist portrays this anthro- pologist—who during deliberations had described work at mu ...

people said that the [proposal] didn’t actually live up to what the person said he/she was going to do. Anthropologists’ relatio ...