To conclude this guest blogging, I end on a light note and reflect on what I did during my summer vacation. At this writing, I am on my way back from “Serenissima Venizia” where I took a well-deserved break with my family. Those who remain fond of Death in Venice and other classical representations of this jewel of a city would certainly, like me, be disappointed by the place. One is hard-pressed to find more than a few virgin back alleys that do not cater to pizza-eating tourists. Piazza San Marco is elbow-to-elbow, even in comparison to Florence or Rome. The locals cannot be seen congregating anywhere, except for the younger ones who meet behind the Rialto fish market in the early evening (and the market location is probably very appropriate, although meat appears to be more in fashion than fish). The other locals who deal with tourism seem to be in a permanent state of enervation/aggravation. Moments on the “vaporeto” (the public transportation system) away from the crowds may be the closest one can get to “serene.” This left me very nostalgic about what Venice was thirty years ago when I first saw it as a back-pack carrying student. Then the place was unique and strange enough – unstandardized enough –that it was still possible to enter in a bordello by mistake (one of my fondest memories of this first trip). [click to continue…]
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Over the past several months, French academics have been facing a grave situation. The Sarkozy Government has proposed a reform of the universities that would put more power into the hands of the president of their university, and weaken the role of peer review. This reform will significantly affect the degree of autonomy of faculty teaching in universities. It is feared that university presidents will depend on their local protégés (who are often selected on political, instead of academic criteria) to make a number of important decisions that will affect the lives of faculty. Universalistic mechanisms had been put in place at the national level to prevent local favoritism and particularism. This system is now threatened from within. [click to continue…]
<a href=”http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LAMHOW.html”>How Professors Think</a> shows that across all disciplines, evaluations depend on taste and expertise. Because tastes are often idiosyncratic (what is “fascinating” is what looks like me or reinforces my own line of scholarship), funding agencies should explicitly instruct panelists to value the quality of the proposal (expertise) more than what excites (a matter of taste).
How Professors Think also shows that economists and historians have very different views concerning where excellencet resides – in the object being evaluated or in the eyes of the beholder. While economists think that excellence is objective and is to be found in the proposal itself (that a clear line separates what is first rate from the rest), scholars hailing from more interpretive fields believe that evaluators play a central role in giving value to the proposals – indeed, that they are engaged in the coproduction of excellence. While participating in panel deliberations, they produce what they hope will be convincing arguments about what is good work. They don’t think that their views – their subjectivity – corrupt the process. Instead, they think it is essential to the process, because they are asked to serve in their quality as connoisseurs, as experts who have spent many years developing a very refined classification system for understanding what the field has already produced and what is new and promising. [click to continue…]
Thanks to Crooked Timber for this invitation to serve as guest blogger — it’s exciting.
To get us started, IÂ respond to the recent discussion here at Crooked Timber in response to <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2009/05/20/michele-lamont-on-philosophers”>Harry’s post</a>Â Â prompted by what I write about philosophers in <a href=”http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LAMHOW.html”>How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment</a>.
1) What is a philosopher? Since weed was evoked in the thread, here is a sociological definition, which builds on Howard Becker’s famous 1963 paper “<a href=”http://www.jstor.org/pss/2771989″>On Becoming a Marijuana Smoker</a>”: Is recognized as a philosopher someone who labels himself and is labeled by others as such. No essentialism here. Only a social process of definition of identity, which is bounded by institutional constraints (e.g. whether one is paid to be a lecturer in philosophy), and by cultural/cognitive constraints as well (i.e. one has to have some knowledge of the disciplinary cannon). No need to be an innovator in the field, as the term generally encompasses consumers and diffusers.
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