How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment

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touched areas seems to me a good thing to do. Some of the appli-
cations that I remember being very beautifully crafted fell lower
in the rankings, either overall or just in my view, because they
were going over such familiar ground. And even if the person was
brilliant and had something somewhat original to say about it, I
would end up feeling that this is less important work overall than
scholarship in some area that Western scholars just don’t have any
exposure to.

Feminist scholarship and “non-Western topics” frequently are
portrayed as having been historically neglected or “marginalized.”
Feminist research has been circumscribed by a tradition of gender-
neutral scholarship that ignores the gendered character of all aspects
of social life; non-Western topics have been hampered by a Eurocen-
tric scholarly tradition that privileges “the West” over all other ar-
eas.^42 Both also are likely to be identified by more conservative forces
as politically correct pet topics of the academic left, along with criti-
cal subaltern studies, antipositivist research, and work that addresses
antiglobalization and environmentalism.
The earlier work of Everett Carl Ladd Jr. and Seymour Martin
Lipset, as well as the more recent work of sociologists Neil Gross and
Solon Simmons, shows how politically progressive academics are
overall, especially in the social sciences and the humanities.^43 Thus
it is hardly surprising that quality and social justice are conflated
at times. Academics who see their research as contributing in very
significant ways to the production of social representations are
concerned with giving voice to subordinate, neglected, or marginal
groups. This type of social contribution has become particularly val-
ued since the 1980s, with the growing influence of “history from be-
low” in cultural history; of the Birmingham School (with its focus
on resistance) in English, cultural studies, sociology, and anthropol-
ogy; and with parallel developments in political theory (where the


230 / Considering Interdisciplinarity and Diversity

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