Whatever Became of the Heckling Campaign?

I periodically receive correspondence inquiring, in one form or another, “Whatever became of the Heckling campaign?” In the hopes of satisfying the curiosity of other users of the PGR with the same question, and thus saving myself a lot of individual correspondence, let me give an extended answer to this query:

So what became of the Heckling campaign? The simple answer is: it’s been moribund for a long time now. There hasn’t been a new signature on the letter in about six months (and perhaps 2 or 3 per month before that), and the last signature was actually from an English professor, rather than a philosopher! The Heck site counter reports about 700 hits per month, during a time period when the PGR itself has been getting nearly 300,000 hits per month. (Of course, “hits” overstate the number of actual readers, by a factor of at least five to one.) When my RA undertook a random search of sites that link to the PGR, he found that about 1% of those also linked to the Heck site. The Heck letter has topped off with not quite 2% of professional philosophers having signed it, and the signatories consist almost entirely of the Harvard-Berkeley circle of influence, plus the SPEPPies (the “revenge” of the later Wittgensteinians and the Heideggerians?!?).

(Note: 2% understates, to be sure, the amount of opposition to the PGR, since there remain two other clusters of opposition: (1) philosophers who, for various reasons, dislike the PGR, but realize that Harvard would be the primary beneficiary of a successful attack on the PGR; and (2) a lunatic fringe that would like to leave all undergraduates at the mercy of their teachers (more charitably, it’s fair to say that some teachers resent the fact that their students now have an independent source of information, which reduces the teacher’s own influence and importance.). This fringe--to which Professor Heck himself belonged initially [back when the site was called, more honestly, “Anti-PGR”], until he discovered he couldn’t get many people to sign the first version of his “open letter” calling for the PGR to be abolished—presumably would not sign the actual “open letter” which admits, grudgingly, that the PGR is useful.)

The handful of students who even mention the Heck letter anymore in correspondence uniformly refer to it in the context of “how badly it reflects on Harvard” or “how good it makes your Report look” and so on. Interestingly, some students appear to interpret the site and the letter as reflecting fundamental contempt for or indifference to students, an inference which I actually don’t think is warranted—certainly not for all the signatories--though it is easy to see how a student might come away thinking that. (It is not lost on students that a year-and-a-half after launching his smear campaign, Professor Heck has not come up with any constructive alternative for the benefit of prospective students.)

The most curious phenomenon, though, is this. I’ve now had correspondence, sometimes quite extended, with dozens of signatories to the letter, and, with the exception of one or two, none endorse the actual “arguments” in the letter, let alone those elsewhere on the Heck site. (Many signatories even participated in the 2002-04 PGR surveys!) Indeed, if there is one recurring view among signatories it is the view expressed by Professor Lynne Rudder Baker elsewhere on the Heck site: “I think that the Leiter Report disseminates some important information. My objection is that undergraduates seem to hang onto the rankings to the exclusion of other factors that we agree are significant, even other factors that are discussed in the Leiter Report.”

Of course, an open letter that urged students not to “hang onto the rankings to the exclusion of other factors” and to pay attention to the PGR’s many existing admonitions about other important factors is a letter I would have signed. (Though I confess I agree with Brian Weatherson that this worry may be overblown.)

But such a letter would have been constructive and honest, and devoid of the outrageous allegations (e.g., the PGR "harms" undergraduates) and feeble arguments that mar the actual letter and web site—but this is old news, and those interested in the details can see my lengthy reply from January 2002 , or the various letters posted by Keith DeRose .

To his credit, Professor Heck did finally note that the 2002-04 Report had not changed in any of the respects Professor Heck had called for (and thus he finally removed the various comments from his site claiming that the PGR was changing to accommodate his criticisms). Of course, the reasons why it did not change in those respects ought to have been clear from my original reply to the Heck “arguments,” such as they were. (Just to be clear: I have been assured by philosophers I trust that Richard Heck is, in fact, a much more talented philosopher than the quality of argumentation on his anti-PGR site would suggest. I recently had the pleasure of reading, for example, his extremely interesting paper on “Non-conceptual Content and the ‘Space of Reasons’” from Philosophical Review 109 (2000), pp. 483-523, which I highly recommend to (advanced) philosophy students.)

On the other hand, the changes in the Report for 2002-04 appear to have been well-received by many others, and I thank, as always, those who contributed useful ideas and feedback during 2001-02 (including a good number of philosophers who signed the Heck letter). Certainly, the volume of traffic on the Report’s site suggests that its use has reached an all-time high, both by professional philosophers, graduate students, and prospective students, as well as scholars and students in other disciplines, many of whom write me with interesting comments and ideas, and all of whom lament the absence of a similar resource in their disciplines. Perhaps, in time, others in other fields will take advantage of the Internet to make good, current information and evaluations available to students.