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Scholarly life is the subject of two new books: Professing to Learn, by Anna Neumann, and How Professors Think, by Michele Lamont. Neumann, a professor of higher education at Teachers College, Columbia University, focuses on how individual faculty members do (or do not) manage to stay engaged with their subjects of study amid the growing demands of post-tenure careers. Lamont, a Harvard University sociologist, follows professors into meetings where collective decisions about the quality of scholarly work are made. Together these books take readers into areas of individual and collective endeavor that, while deeply familiar to senior academics, are seldom placed on public view.
Mary Taylor Huber is a consulting scholar and senior scholar emerita at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. She has written extensively about changing faculty cultures in U.S. higher education, focusing especially on the scholarship of teaching and learning. She is coauthor, with Pat Hutchings, of The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons (2005).
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