Those faculties that saw the most dramatic drops in overall rank in the 2009 surveys compared to the fall 2006 surveys were Stanford University, which fell from 6th to 9th; Columbia University from 9th to 13th; University of Texas at Austin, from 13th to 20th; Johns Hopkins University from 35th to 43rd; University of Washington at Seattle from 35th to 43rd; and Arizona State University from 44th to outside the "top 53." Outside the U.S., the most dramatic downward movement was probably by the University of Melbourne, which fell well outside the Australasian top four after being squarely in the top five in all prior surveys. (The financial difficulties facing Melbourne, and the loss of academic staff, are noted here.)
Stanford had three significant changes that surely caused the drop in overall rank: John Perry (philosophy of language and mind) entered a retirement arrangement which has him teaching part-time at Stanford for a few more years and half-time at UC Riverside. In addition, Allen Wood (Kant, 19th-century Continental philosophy) and Rega Wood (medieval philosophy) accepted senior offers from Indiana University, Bloomington. Stanford may still lure them back, but without "all" of Perry and the losses of the Woods, Stanford took a clear hit.
Columbia lost the political philosopher Thomas Pogge to Yale, and also saw a number of regular and cognate faculty enter the "over 70" category as of 2009 (including Haim Gaifman and Joseph Raz). Still, I'm inclined to think Columbia's slip is a bit of a statistical blip, rather than a fundamental change in the department.
Texas had more losses since the fall 2006 surveys. Robert Kane, a leading writer on free will and ethics, retires at the end of this academic year, and so was no longer listed on the faculty since he will not be teaching as of 09-10. Robert C. Solomon, well-known for work in philosophy of the emotions, ethics, and Continental philosophy, passed away unexpectedly. Kane and Solomon, together, had long been mainstays of the faculty. In addition, the legal and political philosopher Leslie Green (who had been part-time) and me (working partly in legal and moral philosophy, partly in Continental philosophy) both left. I thought the department made some strong senior and junior appointments in the interim (including Ian Proops [history of analytic philosophy, Kant] from Michigan, and, on a half-time basis, Hans Kamp [philosophy of language, formal semantics] who is emeritus at Stuttgart), and while these appointments deepened the faculty's strength in particular areas, it obviously did not offset the narrowing effects of the losses. This appears to be the flip-side of the Yale story: breadth yields favorable result in the PGR surveys, lack of breadth not as much.
Johns Hopkins, a small department with (in my opinion) unusually high per capita faculty quality, lost a mainstay of the department for decades, the philosopher of science Peter Achinstein, who moved to Yeshiva University, as well as some junior faculty (though they made an outstanding junior appointment in early modern philosophy).
Washington may also be a statistical blip, though they did suffer some losses, including the ancient philosophy scholar Marc Cohen, who is phasing into retirement, and the environmental philosopher Andrew Light, who moved to George Mason.
Finally, Arizona State's drop is easy to explain: Stewart Cohen (epistemology), the preeminent senior member of the faculty (apart from the legal philosopher Jeffrie Murphy, who is now mainly in the law school), accepted an offer from the University of Arizona. ASU continued to enjoy a good showing in several areas in the specialty rankings, however, including feminist philosophy, ethics and applied ethics, decision, rational choice & game theory, and philosophy of biology, among other areas.
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