I spend a lot of time noting the comings and goings of philosophers at programs that grant graduate degrees; this information is useful to prospective students, and thus of value to those who advise prospective graduate students as well.
But it also gives, admittedly, a misleading impression about the distribution of philosophical talent.
Here's a simple fact: the job market for philosophers is so competitive, and so many very able people enter the field, that these days you could staff a damn good PhD program with philosophers employed at non-research universities.
This isn't to say that those at the very good PhD programs aren't, by and large, very good philosophers. It's to say that they are also, more often than not, very well-connected, well-pedigreed philosophers. Talent and ability is a threshold requirement for being hired at the best departments; but that is all it is.
Look at Mark Heller, by all accounts a very talented metaphysician, who was recently hired away from Southern Methodist University to Syracuse University, from which he earned his Ph.D. Might he have been at a PhD program for the last twenty years if his Ph.D. had been from Princeton instead of Syracuse (itself a rather good program, but not Princeton)? Perhaps.
Some of the distribution of philosophical talent has to do with field. Take Nietzsche studies, and Continental philosophy, generally: this is a non-preferred field at many of the top programs, i.e., it is the kind of field (like medieval philosophy, or early modern, or mathematical logic, or medieval philosophy, or Kant studies) in which very good departments will often hire only one person, if that.
That would explain why, uncontroversially, the single most important senior scholar in English-speaking Nietzsche studies, Maudemarie Clark, teaches at Colgate University, a fine liberal arts college in upstate New York. If she worked on Plato or Kant, and her work were of comparable importance, she'd be at a research university, indeed probably a top department.
The over-supply of philosophical talent relative to the number of positions at research universities also explains why we see research universities periodically snatching up faculty from places like Davidson and Reed (not to mention SMU), though it still doesn't happen as often as it justifiably could.
More than a century ago, Max Weber observed that he knew of no career in which "luck" played a bigger role than the academic one. That, I fear, is still true, though the PGR has helped reduce the "chance" element a bit. But a focus on graduate faculties also gives, as noted, a somewhat distorted picture of the distribution of philosophical talent.
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