How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment

cross, check, discussion, advocacy, persuasion, settling on a consen-
sus, balancing.” Still, the affirmative response of a very distinguished
American historian to my query about whether he “believes in” ex-
cellence is representative of the panelists’ position overall:

It’s something that it’s important to strive towards, recognizing

and practicing academic excellence. If we don’t have some ideas of

what is excellent, it’s reduced to a total relative situation where ev-

erything is worth as much as anything else, and I don’t think that

would be a very successful path, either for training or turning out

good research...There’salwaysgoingtobesomedisagreement

about academic excellence, but we need to work toward shaping it

as best we can and to finding it, even though one knows that it’s

based on our own symbolic instructions.

Similarly, an African-American woman historian says:

I don’t think it’s an objective standard that exists...butI’mal-

ways struck by how much of a consensus there seems to be about

what excellence is. I don’t know that it’s necessarily objective, or

consistent even, but I think that there is a sense of the kinds of

standards that we can at least begin to agree upon. [Such as?]In-

tegrity of the research. Is research based in some kind of rigorous

testing, in terms of the way in which it’s collected, the ideas be-

hind [it], the methodologies that are used to follow up the con-

ceptualization of a project. Clarity of thought, having very clear

ways of articulating what it all means. Having some way of inter-

preting for others why [it is] important, and what it means, and

what relevance it has to a particular field of knowledge or to a

larger body of knowledge. Explaining what contributions it’s go-

ing to make, and making some important contributions along the

lines of originality, along the lines of... building on...thework

86 / On Disciplinary Cultures