In the 1950s, the top philosophy program in the United States was, by a wide margin, Harvard (W.V.O. Quine, an aging C.I. Lewis, Morton White, Roderick Firth, etc.), followed by some mix of Cornell (Max Black, Norman Malcom, a young John Rawls, etc.), Michigan (William Frankena, Cooper Langford, Charles Stevenson, etc.), Princeton (esp. after Carl Hempel and Gregory Vlastos moved there circa 1955), and Yale (Hempel, until he left for Princeton, but also a young Wilfrid Sellars, Brand Blanshard, Alan Anderson, Arthur Pap, etc.), and then some mix of, depending on who you asked, UCLA, Chicago, Columbia, Brown, maybe Berkeley.
A decade later, say circa 1965, Harvard was till on top (Quine, Rawls, a young Putnam, Owen, etc.), but Princeton was now a powerhouse (Hempel, Vlastos, Hampshire, a young Gil Harman, a young Richard Rorty, a young Joel Feinberg, etc.), Cornell (Black, Malcolm, a young Shoemaker, etc.) and Michigan (Alston, Brandt, Frankena, Stevenson, a young Alvin Goldman, etc.) were still among the top five, with Pittsburgh (Sellars, Rescher, K. Baier, Grunbaum, etc.) closing in. Yale, after the exodus of faculty to Pittsburgh, was fading though perhaps hanging on in the top ten; Columbia and Chicago were hanging on too; while UCLA (Carnap, Montague, a young Kaplan, a young David Lewis [66-70]etc.) and Berkeley (Feyerband, Mates, a young Searle, a young Stroud) and perhaps Stanford (Suppes, Davidson) were now solidly in the top ten. A brand new program, MIT, was also on the move.
Leap ahead to the early-to-mid 1970s, and a new powerhouse program had arrived: Rockefeller University in New York, with Joel Feinberg, Donald Davidson, Saul Kripke some of the time, Harry Frankfurt, and others. Rockefeller hadn't displaced Harvard or Princeton, but it was competitive with Pittsburgh and Michigan and Cornell. Berkeley, UCLA, and Stanford were now solidly top ten departments by anyone's estimation, MIT was close, Columbia and Yale weren't, and maybe Chicago was. Rockefeller Philosophy came to abrupt end in 1976, when the administration decided to focus solely on the sciences, and the top-flight faculty scattered--Davidson to the University of Chicago, Feinberg to the increasingly prominent University of Arizona, Frankfurt to the fractured Yale Department, Kripke to Princeton.
By the early-to-mid 1980s, it was now indisputable that Princeton dominated English-speaking philosophy, with Harvard, Pittsburgh, Berkeley, and UCLA rounding out the top programs, and Stanford, Chicago, MIT, Cornell, and Michigan (battered by the losses of Brandt, Frankena, Goldman, Stich, etc., but still boasting Gibbard, Kim, Sklar, a young Railton, etc.) rounding out the ranks of top programs. Arizona (Feinberg, Lehrer, Goldman, Schiffer, etc.) was on the cusp of the "top ten."
A decade later, in the early 1990s, Princeton was still on top, Harvard was ailing, Pittsburgh, Berkeley, and UCLA were still very strong, and Michigan had recouped and joined the competition for the very best programs. Stanford, MIT, Cornell were still in the top ranks of graduate programs, Chicago was in decline, displaced by Arizona and Rutgers.
Which brings us to the present. The last decade was very hard on Berkeley, also on Cornell. The current PGR "top ten" includes one total newcomer, NYU, plus old-timers Princeton, Michigan, and Pittsburgh, relative newcomer Rutgers, old-timer Stanford, and then a rejuvenated Columbia, plus Harvard, MIT, UCLA, and Arizona.
So what can we conclude about program quality in a half-century perspective?
Princeton, Michigan, Harvard, UCLA have been top-flight (i.e., "top ten") programs for a half-century.
Pittsburgh, Stanford, MIT have been top-flight programs for four decades--in the case of Pitt and MIT, that really makes them comparable in longevity to Princeton/Michigan/Harvard/UCLA given that Pitt and MIT didn't have graduate programs until the 1960s.
Cornell and Berkeley had long periods of "top-flight" dominance, which may now be over.
Brown, Chicago, Columbia have had more erratic careers among the top-flight programs, sometimes clearly in those ranks, other times clearly not.
Arizona and Rutgers are "relative" newcomers to the top ranks; it remains to be seen whether they stay there.
Every decade in the last half-century has seen at least one new arrival in the top ranks of the profession:
In the 1950s, it was Princeton and, less dramatically, UCLA.
In the 1960s, it was Pittsburgh, and, less dramatically, MIT and Stanford.
In the 1970s, it was Rockefeller.
In the 1980s, it was Arizona and the beginnings of Rutgers.
In the 1990s, it was Rutgers and then NYU.
Who will it be in the 2000s?
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