How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment

For an English professor, these elements of chance work against the more innovative proposals: The alternates, sometimes to me t ...

and we had like three or four proposals to go. [Some] were sort of on the fence, [and] there were a few people who were pushing ...

Conclusion Scholars engaged in grant peer review claim to pursue and honor ex- cellence, and indeed excellence is what holds the ...

comments and observations show that the act of evaluating is an eminently interactional and emotional undertaking, rather than a ...

recruiting members. Those who never apply for or receive grants and fellowships may be more likely to believe that the allocatio ...

5/Recognizing Various Kinds of Excellence I nThe University in Ruins,the literary scholar Bill Readings re- marks that “the idea ...

and David Riesman observed that in the modern university, “claims of localism, sectarianism, ethnic prejudice and preference, cl ...

nescent qualities that are valued by panelists, most of which pertain more to the applicant than to the project. These evanescen ...

recommendation), and, for the panelists, comments and a ranking assigned by the screeners. Panelists understand proposals as par ...

Advanced projects strike reviewers as almost “always better” because they are more specific, complete, and “elegant.” Here the “ ...

a sense of excitement about the project,” which can be produced only if the letter writer has immersed herself in the work. “All ...

letters of hers. I trust [them] and her intellect. She’s not going to pump a candidate up, and she’s also not going to deflate a ...

Six Criteria for Recognizing Excellence Chapter 2 described the formal criteria that funding agencies ask panelists to consider ...

out. One anthropologist directly connects the valuing of a wide range of topics and types of scholarship with different standard ...

as important as substance: it is a prerequisite for running the race. This is in part because of the time constraints typically ...

Craftsmanship is admired by a sociologist who, when asked if he believes in academic excellence, answers, “If what we mean by ex ...

scholar describes as “spouting opinion.” It is also frequently con- trasted with the haphazard collection of evidence and with s ...

rians in how much importance they attach to any of these four crite- ria. As shown in Table 5.1, originality is mentioned at lea ...

that their descriptions point toward a much broader definition than that posited in the literature.^15 We constructed a typology ...

Table 5.2 Frequencies of mentions of generic and specific types of originality Generic types (N = 217) Originalapproach Freq.(%) ...