Michèle Lamont, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
H ow do academics define excellence?How do scholars from different disciplines judge the quality of research proposals and how do they manage to agree about the "best" ones?During the review process, does "the cream" rise naturally to the top?Is the peer review process "fair"?How does it handle the tensions between excellence and diversity, and between meritocracy and democracy?These are the questions Michèle Lamont wishes to answer in How Professors Think, on the basis of an empirical study of peer review in multi-disciplinary humanities and social science grant competitions in the US.Lamont targeted five national funding competitions and 12 multidisciplinary panels charged with distributing fellowships and grants to faculty members and graduate students in support of scholarly research.Over a 2-year period, Lamont conducted 81 interviews with panelists and with the panels' program officers and chairpersons.She was also able to observe three of the panels.The panelists she interviewed came from the following disciplines: history (14), literature (7), anthropology (7), political science (6), sociology (6), anthropology (5), musicology (3), art history (2), economics (2), classics (2), philosophy (2), geography (1) and evolutionary biology (1).The semi-structured interviews (conducted over the phone within a few hours or a few days of panel deliberations) focused on "the arguments that panelists had made for and against specific proposals, their views about the outcomes of the competition, and the thinking behind the ranking of proposals" (p.13), and also on how they recognized excellence in their students and colleagues, whether they believe in academic excellence, whether they thought that "the cream rises to the top," etc.The 15 interviews with program officers and chairpersons provided details about what had happened during the panel deliberation (since direct observation was impossible for 9 of the 12 panels)."Excellence," "quality," or "originality" are not defined in the same ways by scholars from different disciplines.This hardly comes as a surprise, but Lamont's account of "disciplinary cultures" offers a more sys-
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.054 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.022 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".