How Professors Think -- inside the peer review process

Inside Higher Ed (March 4) had a lengthy review of a new book by Michèle Lamont, called How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. She sat in on considerations of grant and fellowship applications for such organizations as the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Some (hopefully) tantalizing excerpts from the interview/review:

• "The peer review processes she studied involved grants to professors and graduate students, and all the panels involved professors from many disciplines. She writes that, as a result, the findings may suggest similar issues for multi-disciplinary committees on individual campuses -- panels that frequently play a key role in tenure reviews once a candidate has been considered at the departmental level. "
• "One of the key findings was that professors in different disciplines take very different approaches to decision making. The gap between humanities and social sciences scholars is as large as anything C.P. Snow saw between the humanities and the hard sciences."
• "The most common flaw she documents is a pattern of professors applying very personal interests to evaluating the work before them. “People define what is exciting as what speaks to their own personal interest, and their own research,” she said. "

I'll put the book on order...