The story is here (subscription access only, I'm afraid). From experience, I've developed low expectations about media coverage, so my expectations were certainly met. Below are a few excerpts, and some comments.
Graduate programs in English or history may be able to rest on their laurels for years -- or, alternatively, spend a decade trying to prove that their stock has risen. In philosophy, however, the widely read rankings report has taken hold, despite critics, and now helps determine where students enroll in graduate school, how much money deans give departments, and even, some say, which scholars get hired. The online rankings -- which rate the top-50 programs every other year -- have also loosened the stranglehold on prestige that elite universities have in most disciplines, allowing public universities with top-notch programs to rise to the top....
This paragraph accurately sums up (at least based on the evidence I have) the central facts about the PGR's impact.
Although the country has more than 100 Ph.D. programs in philosophy, the field is smaller than many other disciplines, including English and political science. That size, professors say, makes it ripe for gossip. "One thing you can say about philosophers," says Jason Stanley, an associate professor at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, "is that we like to talk."
Professors in English and political science do not "gossip," of course. They don't even talk. I'm sure Jason was surprised to see his remark put to this use.
While many in philosophy lust after higher rankings, the Gourmet Report has inspired critics. Some professors say the rankings perpetuate a kind of snob factor based on which universities are doing the "right kinds" of philosophy and which aren't. The rankings, they say, value famous analytic professors who study metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language over those in fields like continental European philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy, or feminist philosophy.
That is an extraordinary accusation about a report which includes rankings in Continental philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy, and feminist philosophy. But facts have never stood in the way of critics or journalists.
"Philosophy in the United States today is far more diverse in the interests and approaches of those who teach it and study it than is reflected by the report," says William L. McBride, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Purdue University, which did not make it into the top 50 last year.
Alas, this is wishful thinking on Professor McBride's part. Forget the PGR: just look at what counts as philosophy at the 60-odd universities that are members of the Association of American Universities, the nation's top research institutions. The mix of areas, and their importance, in the PGR tracks perfectly what, in fact, is the actual diversity of interests and approaches at the nation's leading research universities.
Robert Pasnau, chairman of philosophy at [the University of Colorado at Boulder], warns that graduate students in particular put too much stock in the rankings. Dropping eight places is not as big a deal as some believe, he says.
"They make the mistake of comparing 15th to 25th, but it makes no difference whatsoever," he says. Still, Boulder has just made a batch of new hires this spring and "it will be a bit infuriating," acknowledges Mr. Pasnau, if those don't boost the department when the rankings come out again in 2006.
Why hiring junior faculty, who have yet to establish their reputations (and who can, only rarely, help graduate students secure jobs), should compensate for the loss of established and accomplished senior philosophers is not obvious. (That's true even when, as with several of Colorado's hires, they have already published in good journals.) Perhaps they will.
Department chairmen in other fields do not have such ranking worries. While graduate programs in other disciplines must rely on 10-year-old rankings from the National Research Council or on occasional ratings published by U.S. News & World Report, the Gourmet Report tracks the top 50 every other year, and publishes it all on the Internet. The rankings are based on the professional reputations of a department's professors, and the gain or loss of a couple of prominent faculty members can make the difference between shame and glory for a department.
Most changes involve neither "shame" nor "glory," of course. But sometimes the changes matter to students, both current and prospective, and they deserve to know.
The report was born in 1989, during Brian Leiter's second year of graduate school at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Some of his friends asked him for advice on where to apply for graduate work....So Mr. Leiter assembled his own list of the country's top departments and typed it up. Soon after he produced the first printed report, Mr. Leiter began getting requests for copies from graduate departments across the country.
In 1997 Blackwell Publishing offered to pay Mr. Leiter to produce it. (He earns a fee in the low five figures.)
Low four figures, alas.
For most of the report's life, the rankings have been based solely on Mr. Leiter's "own gestalt sense of things," he says. The professor is a walking gossip machine and can rattle off the number of senior philosophers that Ohio State University lost this year (four) and the names of three prominent philosophers who just decided to leave Northwestern University: Terry Pinkard, Thomas Ricketts, and Charles Travis.
"Gossip"? In one of our phone conversations, Robin Wilson, the Chronicle reporter, agreed with me that "gossip" was a pejorative term, and it certainly has nothing to do with the PGR. The PGR doesn't report who is sleeping with whom, who is getting divorced, who is harassing students; it reports professional information of relevance to students. Full stop.
Mr. Leiter has his own blog, called Leiter Reports (http://leiterreports.typepad.com), where he dishes about such matters, speculating on the comings and goings of prominent philosophers and about what the moves might mean for a department's reputation.
There is no "speculation" (let alone "dishing"!) about comings and goings: all that is reported is factual, based on information provided by the philosophers in question, or the hiring departments, or the departments losing that faculty member.
Sometimes department chairmen or members of a search committee contact Mr. Leiter about offers they have made, and sometimes information comes from the candidates themselves. Five years ago, when Mr. Leiter himself received a job offer from the University of Pennsylvania, he posted the news -- and wrote an update when he declined.
Some senior philosophers find the insider nature of Mr. Leiter's blog distasteful. "There is just no privacy anymore," laments George Bealer, who has appeared in Mr. Leiter's blog twice in the last year -- once before his move from Boulder to Austin in the fall, and now because he has an offer from Yale University.
George knows full well he has no privacy interest in the facts about his professional movements.
"I don't even like telling people when I get a cold," says Mr. Bealer. "That's my business." Although the Gourmet Report has "vastly improved the quality of information available to graduate students," he says, online speculation about a professor's career moves is unbecoming to academe. "We are fortunate to work in a comparatively cultivated walk of life," says Mr. Bealer. "I am afraid that an element of cultivation has been lost."
Mr. Bealer is not the only philosopher who is bothered by the Gourmet Report and Mr. Leiter's blog.
George, by his own admission, isn't "bothered" by either. Indeed, he wrote to me yesterday: "The article seriously misrepresents what I believe and what I said to Robin Wilson....I expressed no reservations at all about the Philosophical Gourmet." Journalists, alas, think that "balance" means presenting "both sides," regardless of the merits ("some say black is white, but others disagree"; "some say evolution is a well-confirmed scientific theory, proponents of Intelligent Design disagree"). There are pertinent criticisms of the PGR--indeed, most of the changes and improvements grew out of such criticisms--but the ones mentioned in this article aren't, in general, among them. Reporting public facts about offers is not "speculation," and it is information relevant to prospective students.
In 2002, 287 philosophers signed an open letter to Mr. Leiter, complaining that the rankings promoted a "narrow and inappropriate standard of departmental excellence."
287 of approximately 13-15,000 philosophers in the English-speaking world. Too bad no mention was made of how many of those 287 have since participated in PGR surveys.
Just because a philosopher was famous, the letter said, didn't mean he or she was a good teacher or adviser. Yet students who use the rankings to decide where to enroll in graduate school don't necessarily realize that.
"In every field there are well-known cases of individual faculty who you know are terrific researchers but who you wouldn't want to send one of your students to work with," says Richard G. Heck Jr., a professor of philosophy at Harvard University who drafted the 2002 letter.
Of course, for a decade prior to "the 2002 letter," the PGR contained exactly this warning: the research quality of the faculty, while hugely important (even by Professor Heck's own admission), is no guarantee of the quality of training or mentoring. One of the mysteries about Professor Heck's initiative was why he was protesting the PGR in terms the PGR already endorsed.
To answer the critics, Mr. Leiter set out to make the ranking system more democratic. He established an advisory board of 70 philosophers, who help him assemble an online survey that he distributes to 400 professors.
Well, it wasn't quite to "answer the critics": none of the changes made since 2002 spoke to any of the Heck criticisms. But it did seem to be me beneficial to enlist the "official" input and advice of some of the many philosophers whom I knew supported the enterprise. The on-line survey, also, predates the Advisory Board, but the Board has helped diversify the evaluator pool by nominating evaluators.
"One way the report has influenced the field is that it's created this huge, very competitive market for senior people," says Mr. Pasnau, the chairman at Boulder. "Now, no matter where you are, you're thinking: We have to get a superstar."
This is obviously not true, as the case of Washington University in St. Louis (featured later in the article) shows: the Department hired two up-and-coming associate professors and one senior philosopher--but no "superstars"--and saw its national standing rise dramatically.
But state universities like Boulder can't always compete for top philosophers, who are known to pull down as much as $200,000 a year, plus hefty housing allowances in expensive cities and money for travel to research conferences.
If state universities can not compete for the top philosophers--the ones who can get students jobs!--then that fact deserves to be known as well.
While some professors lament the Gourmet Report and its influence, others clearly bask in the glow of high rankings. For years, Princeton stood out as the top philosophy department in the country. New York University and Rutgers University at New Brunswick followed close behind.
"For years" NYU and Rutgers weren't even on the map; the PGR made it possible for departments at non-prestige universities to be recognized for their excellence in a timely manner.
But in 2002, Rutgers and NYU moved up to create a three-way tie for first place with Princeton. Rutgers did not hesitate to advertise the fact on the cover of its alumni magazine in 2003: "Philosophy Is No. 1!" it blared.
By 2004, however, Rutgers had slipped to No. 2 behind NYU, which pulled ahead to hold the top slot on its own.
Professors at Rutgers and NYU say the Gourmet Report also has an equalizing effect. "The chief positive impact the report has had on the field is to make it more meritocratic," says Mr. Stanley, at Rutgers. "People are less afraid of moving to excellent departments at universities that aren't elite, Ivy League schools."
Graduate students agree that the report has helped steer them to places that they wouldn't necessarily have expected.
Graduate students are, of course, the main beneficiaries of the PGR, though oddly we don't hear about them until two-thirds of the way into the article.
Joshua Schechter used the rankings in deciding to enroll at NYU in 1998. "Without knowing from the report that NYU was considered so strong, I wouldn't have given it a second thought," says Mr. Schechter, who will finish his doctorate this summer and begin working as an assistant professor at Brown this fall. "As an undergrad, you think the top schools are Harvard and Princeton," says Mr. Schechter, who earned his bachelor's degree from the latter. "The idea that NYU would have a world-class philosophy department sounded a little bizarre."
When NYU shot up to the top ranks of the PGR in the late 1990s, I heard much grousing from philosophers elsewhere: "How can you rate them so highly when they haven't produced any students yet?" "That department is full of prima donnas, I would never send a student there!" and so on. From years of doing the PGR, I have grown accustomed to the extent to which intelligent people can both deceive themselves and be completely ignorant of simple facts. Any sociologist of the profession could have predicted that a Department composed of distinguished philosophers--who had trained many students at their prior places of employment--would produce highly successful PhDs in philosophy. I said this to the critics at the time, and subsequent events completely vindicated my position. The same had happened with Rutgers in the early 1990s, and, again, I was correct.
Before the Gourmet Report became popular, philosophy students interested in graduate school had little to go on. "People were just in the dark," says Ned Block, a philosophy professor at NYU. "Many people I know who are prominent in philosophy today picked their graduate school on the basis of the most shoddy evidence. One person told me he picked his program because it was mentioned in a Simon & Garfunkel song."
Besides attracting good students, top ratings can also earn a department kudos -- and more importantly, more money -- from university administrators.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that one major, salutary effect of the PGR has been increased monies being allocated to Philosophy Departments around the country, since philosophy is now a field where Deans can see the almost immediate impact of their investments.
Stephen Schiffer, chairman of the philosophy department at NYU, says his department's No. 1 ranking has earned it special treatment. "The university is nice to you," he says. "They are supportive of your recruiting. We have credibility...."
Even philosophy departments that are lower down the ladder try to use the rankings to their advantage. Professors at Tulane University have informed the graduate-school dean that their department is on the cusp of the top 50. "It is one of the things I keep in mind in terms of the budget," acknowledges Michael F. Herman, the dean at Tulane.
Mr. Herman says he wishes there were a Gourmet Report for every discipline. "The more information, the better," he says. "Knowing how people in the field view your people is important." Allocating money, he says, is a zero-sum game. "If there were rankings in history, our history department would do well, I think, but I don't know for sure. It would be better if this data were more widespread."
Yes, it would be.
UPDATE: Jason Stanley, valued PGR Advisory Board member, writes:
I think you're reading the Chronicle article much more negatively than it actually comes across (and I've spoken to several people not in philosophy about it). It comes across as quite positive, with some minor grousing by people at Purdue. The message of the article, as a friend in art history summarized it, is "Every field should have a Leiter report."
As I dimly recall, the context of my 'talk' comment was that good philosophers like to be in the same department to talk to one another. But I also wouldn't deny, if asked, that philosophers like to gossip. So if she had asked me that, I would have concurred.... So I don't see that as negative; it's kind of an endearing feature of our community (as Tim Williamson once said to me, 'gossiping is a way of caring about people'). A salient feature of philosophy, as opposed to other disciplines, is that we know who is good and who is not good in our areas (or we have firm opinions on the matter), and we tend to know what they work on. I guess this is because we have simiilar conceptions of the field. Other humanities disciplines aren't like this; my friends in English departments at Cornell and Michigan don't know the junior faculty in English in other top departments, and don't have a sense of what they work on. This makes a Leiter report possible in philosophy, but less possible in English I guess...
Still, I think the best features of the Leiter report didn't really come across -- I tried to push the point that departments at Ivy League places, before the Leiter report, could just repeatedly hire their students without fear of consequences. The report places a check on such behavior. But that didn't come across...
It is probably correct that the overall tenor of the piece is far more positive than the excerpts I commented on would suggest. Alas, when certain tired, and misleading, criticisms are rehashed again and again--in the interest of journalistic "balance"--I do get cranky. As a philosopher elsewhere put it in an e-mail to me earlier today: "I thought it wasn't all that bad, given the inevitable he-said/she-said format most journalists favor."
ANOTHER UPDATE: The full text of the Chronicle story is here.
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