14 DAY TRIAL // Professors at some of the world's most prestigious universities are often faced with a very serious problem, in that they have to decide which of the numerous projects they receive from their students each year or semester is worthy of commendation for millions of dollars-worth of financing. A new book, called How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, and written by Harvard University sociologist Michele Lamont, comes to give some answers to the things professors consider when awarding the large sums of money to a specific design.
According to the book, the diversity and the excellence of the proposals before them are the main two things that tilt the balance one way or the other, at least in the eyes of the professors. There are currently two schools of thought on the matter in the world. The first one advocates that excellence needs to be sacrificed for diversity on certain occasions, or in certain types of projects, while the other one obviously argues the exact contrary.
“Although racial and gender diversity are the types of diversity about which there is most debate in higher education, the kind of diversity that my panelists are most concerned with is institutional diversity and interdisciplinary diversity. I've always studied how people define worth. So it was in some ways a continuation of my earlier work, but applied to a new realm of activity: academia,” Lamont explained in an interview for the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Another important thing that needs to be analyzed when looking at how students' projects get their money is the desire that funders have to see their dollars spread thinly across many areas of research. This increases the chances of something very useful, and potentially very popular, actually turning up. Thus, their possibilities of getting back the money they have placed in a project are larger. If they stick to putting a lot in a single project and that fails, then there's no chance of them ever being able to recuperate their investment.