front cover of How Professors Think
How Professors Think
Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment
Michèle Lamont
Harvard University Press, 2009

Excellence. Originality. Intelligence. Everyone in academia stresses quality. But what exactly is it, and how do professors identify it?

In the academic evaluation system known as “peer review,” highly respected professors pass judgment, usually confidentially, on the work of others. But only those present in the deliberative chambers know exactly what is said. Michèle Lamont observed deliberations for fellowships and research grants, and interviewed panel members at length. In How Professors Think, she reveals what she discovered about this secretive, powerful, peculiar world.

Anthropologists, political scientists, literary scholars, economists, historians, and philosophers don’t share the same standards. Economists prefer mathematical models, historians favor different kinds of evidence, and philosophers don’t care much if only other philosophers understand them. But when they come together for peer assessment, academics are expected to explain their criteria, respect each other’s expertise, and guard against admiring only work that resembles their own. They must decide: Is the research original and important? Brave, or glib? Timely, or merely trendy? Pro-diversity or interdisciplinary enough?

Judging quality isn’t robotically rational; it’s emotional, cognitive, and social, too. Yet most academics’ self-respect is rooted in their ability to analyze complexity and recognize quality, in order to come to the fairest decisions about that elusive god, “excellence.” In How Professors Think, Lamont aims to illuminate the confidential process of evaluation and to push the gatekeepers to both better understand and perform their role.

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front cover of How Writing Faculty Write
How Writing Faculty Write
Strategies for Process, Product, and Productivity
Christine E. Tulley
Utah State University Press, 2018
In How Writing Faculty Write, Christine Tulley examines the composing processes of fifteen faculty leaders in the field of rhetoric and writing, revealing through in-depth interviews how each scholar develops ideas, conducts research, drafts and revises a manuscript, and pursues publication. The book shows how productive writing faculty draw on their disciplinary knowledge to adopt attitudes and strategies that not only increase their chances of successful publication but also cultivate writing habits that sustain them over the course of their academic careers. The diverse interviews present opportunities for students and teachers to extrapolate from the personal experience of established scholars to their own writing and professional lives.
 
Tulley illuminates a long-unstudied corner of the discipline: the writing habits of theorists, researchers, and teachers of writing. Her interviewees speak candidly about overcoming difficulties in their writing processes on a daily basis, using strategies for getting started and restarted, avoiding writer’s block, finding and using small moments of time, and connecting their writing processes to their teaching. How Writing Faculty Write will be of significant interest to students and scholars across the spectrum—graduate students entering the discipline, new faculty and novice scholars thinking about their writing lives, mid-level and senior faculty curious about how scholars research and write, historians of rhetoric and composition, and metadisciplinary scholars.
 
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