Because of my move this summer, there may be some delay in producing the 2008-10 PGR (it is unlikely to be available until late fall or early in the New Year), but we are beginning the planning process now, and there are several matters on which I would welcome feedback from members of the profession.
One issue that has arisen repeatedly over the last several years is the status of faculty cognate to philosophy, or philosophers in other units at a university, who are not necessarily tenured members of the philosophy faculty. The number who fall into this category is now quite large and includes, among many others, Charles Beitz and Philip Pettit at Princeton; Ronald Dworkin, Liam Murphy, and Jeremy Waldron at NYU; Jules Coleman at Yale; Jon Elster and Joseph Raz at Columbia; Matthew Kramer at Cambridge; Jim Nickel at Arizona State; Stephen Perry at Penn; A.A. Long at Berkeley; Kai von Fintel at MIT; and Harvey Friedman at Ohio State, among many others.
Many departments have followed the lead of the PGR, and created a category of "affiliated" faculty to capture those faculty who have cognate interests and/or philosophers in other units. Unfortunately, departments vary quite a bit in how diligent they are about updating their websites, with some getting around to it rarely, while others reputedly padding the faculty lists with loads of faculty from other departments deemed to be "cognate." The more serious problems, however, involve universities which do not have the status of "secondary" or "zero-time" or "affiliated" appointment, and so can not properly list faculty in those categories. Harvard is the paradigm case for this worry, as I have heard from affected faculty at Harvard and many prospective students over the years. Although there are a large number of philosophers or scholars doing cognate work in other units--Dan Brock in the Medical School; Norman Daniels and Daniel Wikler in Public Health; Arthur Applbaum and Mathias Risse in the Kennedy School of Government; Michael Rosen, Michael Sandel, Dennis Thompson, and Richard Tuck in Government--some of whom occasionally teach philosophy courses, and others of whom also do work with PhD students, none of them were reflected in the 2006 (or earlier) PGR surveys. Other schools (Texas is an example) have a quite relaxed view about these listings, with the result that there are many faculty from other units listed as members of the philosophy faculty, even without tenure or even voting rights, and yet who play a major role in the PhD program (Stephen White, a key figure in the classical philosophy program at Texas, is an example).
It is obviously not feasible to ascertain on a case-by-case basis which faculty in other units work with philosophy students and which do not. On the existing approach, schools with "easy" cross-listing policies and/or those who are aggressive about updating their websites and/or those who "pad" the lists get a possible advantage. (The evidence is equivocal on whether padding faculty lists with names of scholars who are largely unknown to philosophers is an advantage--though that is certainly not the worry about the names I've singled out, above.)
The alternate approach we have been considering for the 2008-10 surveys is to create a category of "Cognate Faculty and Philosophers in Other Units" (or something like that) under which other tenure-stream faculty at a university (who are not appointed primarily or jointly in the philosophy department) who do philosophical work or work that is cognate to philosophy are listed. The separate listing of such faculty would signal to evaluators that they should not be weighed quite as heavily for evaluation purposes, yet at the same indicate that they are intellectual resources for students at the school. Presumptively all of the current "affiliated faculty" lists would be incorporated into these lists. As in prior years, we would also publish draft lists of regular and cognate faculty, so the listings would be subject to correction and/or veto by departments (e.g., a department could report that philosopher/cognate faculty member X has nothing to do with PhD students etc.).
I would be interested to hear how grad students and faculty think this issue should be handled. As long as you submit a legitimate e-mail address (one consistent with your ISP identifying information), you need not post your full name. Thanks.
