How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, 1st Edition by Michele Lamont

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.”