How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment

(nextflipdebug5) #1

  1. Veronica Mansilla and Howard Gardner point out other difficulties in
    assessing interdisciplinary work: variety of criteria, lack of conceptual clarity,
    and the challenge of developing germane criteria from the subject matter it-
    self as the inquiry proceeds (evaluators often tend to rely on disciplinary
    proxy criteria instead). Their study—Mansilla and Gardner (2004)—is based
    on sixty interviews with researchers working at interdisciplinary institutes.

  2. Mallard, Lamont, and Guetzkow (2009).

  3. Lamont, Boix Mansilla, and Huutoniemi (2007).

  4. In the case of African-American faculty, for instance, Walter Allen and
    his colleagues show “serious, persistent obstacles to their recruitment, reten-
    tion, and success”; see Allen et al. (2000, 112). See also Jacobs (forthcoming-b)
    and Perna (2001).

  5. On the improving situation in academia, see, for instance, Smith and
    Moreno (2006). Differences in salary and promotion by gender are less pro-
    nounced in the humanities than in other disciplines due to the increased pro-
    portion of female humanities faculty. Both men and women in the humani-
    ties, however, earn on average less than academics in the hard sciences; see
    Ginther and Hayes (2003). On problems affecting the presence of women in
    the academic pipeline, see especially National Academy of Sciences (2006).

  6. See http://www.acls.org/fel-comp.htm (accessed November 1, 2006).

  7. See the WWNFF website at http://www.woodrow.org/diversity.php.

  8. In this approach, the panelists’ views are congruent with the Univer-
    sity of Michigan Law School admissions policy that led toGrutter v. Bollinger
    (litigation that itself built on the 1978 case of theRegents of the University
    of California v. Bakke). This policy aspired to “achieve that diversity which
    has the potential to enrich everyone’s education and thus make a law school
    class stronger than the sum of its parts” (118). This policy does not restrict the
    types of diversity contributions that are eligible for “substantial weight” in
    the admissions process, but instead recognizes “many possible bases for di-
    versity admissions” (118, 120). The policy does, however, reaffirm the law
    school’s longstanding commitment to “one particular type of diversity,” that
    is, “racial and ethnic diversity with special reference to the inclusion of
    students from groups which have been historically discriminated against, like
    African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans, who without this com-
    mitment might not be represented in our student body in meaningful num-
    bers” (120). Thus, the policy does not define diversity “solely in terms of racial
    and ethnic status” (121). SeeGrutter v. Bollinger,539 U.S. 306 (2003); http://


284 / Notes to Pages 209–213

Free download pdf