How Professors Think: the title alone is enough to make students, academics, or anyone interested in higher education in the U.S. pick it up and peruse its pages. Who wouldn’t want an inside glimpse into the working of some of the finest minds in our nation’s colleges? While Dr. Lamont’s deceptively slim volume (only 250 pages leaving out the appendix, references, and notes) does not quite deliver on the promise of all her title entails, what she has achieved her is more subtle and, ultimately, more interesting. Using the method of “opening the black box” of the peer review process as used in the United States, Dr. Lamont paints a fascinating picture of the mindset of academics in several unique disciplines and how they must interact in an interdisciplinary fashion to achieve the stated goal of “rewarding academic excellence.”

Paperback, 2010.

Chinese translation. Beijing, China: Higher Education Press. With original Preface. 2011.
Spanish translation forthcoming. Valencia, Spain: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Valencia.
Korean translation forthcoming. Seoul, South Korea: Korea National Open University.

Reviews

2010 Response to symposium around “How Professors Think”: Inside the Sausage Factory. Sociologica.

August 4, 2009. "Peering Behind the Curtain of Peer Review" by Peggy Berkowitz. University Affairs.

2009. Michele Lamont Reveals How Professors Think—and Why? Bostonist, posted May 5, 2009.

2009. "The 'Black Box' of Peer Review" by Scott Jaschik. Inside Higher Ed, posted March 4, 2009.

Articles

2009. Is Your Stuff Up to Snuff? Teachers College Record, Date Published: November 24, 2009 http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 15847, Date Accessed: 11/25/2009 11:55:20 AM.

2009. Les conditions de l’évaluation universitaire: Quelques réflexions à partir du cas américain (with Bruno Cousin). Mouvements, May 18, 2009.

2009. A Fairness Doctrine For Academia. The Huffington Post, posted May 8, 2009.

2009. Opening the Black Box of Peer Review. The Huffington Post, posted April 30, 2009.

2009. Diversity and Excellence in Higher Education: not Alternatives but Additives. The Huffington Post, posted April 27, 2009.

2009, Re-examing the funding of academia through Obama's Recovery Act. Daily Kos, posted March 26, 2009.

Interviews

2010. Wikipedia Age Challenges Scholars' Sacred Peer Review. New York Times, Posted on August 24, 2010.

2009. Reviewing the Reviewers: A Q&A With Michèle Lamont. The Chronicle of Higher Education, posted April 3, 2009.

2009. Michèle Lamont : "L'expertise des chercheurs doit être au centre du dispositif d'évaluation." nonfiction.fr : Le quotidien des livres et des idées, posted March 30, 2009.

Podcasts

2009. Michèle Lamont is the author of How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. Harvard University Press.

2009. Interview with Michèle Lamont. Academic Evolution posted May 14, 2009.

2009. A Conversation about Michele Lamont’s book “How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment.” Center for European Studies, Harvard University, posted April 8, 2009.

2009. Michèle Lamont discusses her new book, "How Professors Think." National Science Foundation, posted March 31, 2009.

Diversity is largely accepted as a positive value in American society. Nevertheless, policies to encourage diversity, e.g. affirmative action, language policies and legalising illegal immigrants, are still largely disputed, and often understood as having contradictory and largely negative consequences. The implementation of diversity is still seen as a threat to meritocracy, national cohesion, and democracy. This paper analyses how excellence and diversity are discussed in two academic decision-making processes: admission at two elite public universities and the distribution of competitive research fellowships. We argue that excellence and diversity are not alternative but additive considerations in the allocation of resources. The administrators and academics we studied factor diversity in as an additional consideration when decisions are to be made between applicants of roughly equal standing.

Epistemological differences fuel continuous and frequently divisive debates in the social sciences and the humanities. Sociologists have yet to consider how such differences affect peer evaluation. The empirical literature has studied distributive fairness, consensus, and the norm of universalism, but neglected the content of evaluation and how epistemological differences affect perception of fairness in decision-making. The normative literature suggests that evaluators should overcome their epistemological differences by "translating" their preferred standards into general criteria of evaluation. However, little is known about how procedural fairness actually operates in panels, and more specifically about how agreements are reached in the face of epistemological diversity. Drawing on 81 interviews with panelists serving on five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions in the social sciences and the humanities, we show that: 1) Evaluators generally draw on four epistemological styles to make arguments in favor of and against proposals. These are the constructivist, comprehensive, positivist, and utilitarian styles. 2) Although the comprehensive style is favored, there is considerable diversity in the epistemological styles used in the panels we studied; 3) Peer reviewers define a fair-decision making process as one in which panelists engage in "cognitive contextualization," that is, use epistemological styles most appropriate to the field or discipline of the proposal under review. These findings challenge the normative literature that associates procedural fairness with the use of generalizable criteria of evaluation.

As an expert on evaluation in the social sciences, Lamont was asked by the National Science Foundation report to convene a panel of anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists and law and society scholars to discuss how to evaluate qualitative social science research. This report describes the standards that are shared across disciplines. It also includes papers written by more than twenty contributors on various dimensions of the evaluation process and on how to produce excellent proposals.

This article offers a framework for analyzing variations in how members of stigmatized ethno-racial groups establish equivalence with dominant groups through the comparative study of “equalization strategies.” Whereas extant scholarship on anti-racism has focused on the struggle of social movements against institutional and political exclusion and for social justice, we are concerned with the “everyday” anti-racist strategies deployed by members of stigmatized groups. We seek to compare how these strategies vary according to the permeability of inter-group boundaries. The first section defines our research problem and the second section locates our agenda within the current literature. The third section sketches an empirical context for the comparative analysis of equalization strategies across four cases: Palestinian citizens of Israel, Catholics in Northern Ireland, blacks in Brazil, and Québecois in Canada. Whereas the first two cases are examples of ethnic conflict where group boundaries are tightly policed, the second cases exemplify more permeable boundaries. We conclude by offering tentative hypotheses about the relationship between the permeability of inter-group boundaries and the salience and range of equalization strategies used by members of stigmatized ethno-racial groups to establish equivalence with their counterparts in dominant majority groups.