Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

More on Britain's REF results (and comments are open for discussion)

Michael Otsuka (LSE) writes:

The REF ranking your UK colleague sent you is misleading because it simply ranks according to the overall amount of funding a Department will receive, based on the current funding formula. But this sum depends to a large extent on the overall number of people who were submitted to the REF, which, in turn, depends to a large extent on how large the Department is. 

A less misleading ranking, which doesn't give large Departments such a gratuitous advantage simply for being large, is one that just takes the percentage of a Department's overall quality profile ranked 4*, multiplies that by 3, and adds that to the percentage of that Department's overall quality profile ranked 3*. This reflects the government's current formula of funding just 3* and 4* research, with 4* research funded at 3 times 3* research. But it treats all quality profiles of Departments as equal, however many people were submitted. 

Here's the ranking which this generates: 

1. University of Oxford

2. University of Birmingham

3. King's College London

4. University College London

5. University of Cambridge HPS

6. University of St Andrews

7. London School of Economics and Political Science

8. University of Edinburgh

=8. University of Warwick

10. University of Essex

11. University of Sheffield

12. University of Leeds

13. University of Bristol

14. University of Cambridge Phil

15. Birkbeck College

One thing neither your colleague's ranking nor my ranking does is adjust for the ratio of those who were submitted to those who could have been submitted. We don't yet have data for the total number in a Department who could have been submitted, however.

I should note my colleague in the UK also sent me a version of this, too, I was not clear on which results were most relevant.

UPDATE:  The full REF results by subject are downloadable here.  (Thanks to several readers for the pointer.)

ANOTHER:  Filippo Contesi writes:

Please note that, as well as measuring "impact" (for 20% of the overall score), the REF also measures the "environment" of an institution (worth 15% of the overall score), which, alongside things such as number of doctoral degrees awarded, also measures (rather puzzingly, at least prima facie) the institution's research income: http://www.ref.ac.uk/about/guidance/ref4environmentdata/ .

 AND ANOTHER:  Chris Bertram (Bristol) is not impressed.

ALSO I'M OPENING COMMENTS for folks to weigh in about this.  Signed comments (full name, valid e-mail address) will be very strongly preferred.

The New Infantilism, Part 1: "The Trouble with Teaching Rape Law"

Interesting piece by a Harvard law professor, Jeannie Suk, who teaches criminal law.  Some of this is part of the misguided "trigger warning" mania and some of it is related to the "Generation Wuss" phenomenon noted previously.

British REF results 2014

A colleague in the UK sent me the key results for philosophy (reflecting the relationship between the quality of the submissions and the size of the faculty, which is what affects the financial contribution from the government to the university):

1.  Oxford University

2.  Cambridge University (History & Philosophy of Science)

3.  King's College, London

4.  University College London

5.  University of Edinburgh

6.  University of Leeds

7.  University of St Andrews

8.  University of Warwick

9.  Universitoy of Sheffield

10. London School of Economics

11. University of Birmingham

12. Cambridge University (Philosophy)

13. University of Bristol

14. University of Durham

15. Birkbeck College, University of London

One thing I don't know is to what extent the submissions reflected recent changes in faculty rosters:  for example, Cambridge (Philosophy) recently added Holton & Langton from MIT; Sheffield is losing Hookway to retirement; Leeds lost Barnes & Camerson to UVA.  Bear in mind that the UK evaluation exercise is no longe r a purely "scholarly" evaluation, as it also measures "impact," meaning nonsense like how often faculty research is mentioned in the media.

UPDATE:  Michael Otsuka (LSE) writes:

Everyone who was in post on the 31 October 2013 'census date' counts for this REF. So Langton and Holton count, since they were in post by September 2013.

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/holton-langton-from-mit-to-cambridge.html

Barnes and Cameron also count for Leeds, since they didn't leave until well after the census date.

Colleges are not courts

Another procedural horror story.  And on the flipside of the wrongly sanctioned are the victims who also found the college adjudicative process let them down.  The federal government needs to fund a separate adjudicative system with a professional staff to handle these issues, rather than entrusting amateurs in the universities.

The philosophy jobs wiki

We haven't talked about the jobs wiki in awhile, but I'm wondering whether readers believe it is reliable?

Don't check e-mail, be happy!

And on that note, I hereby apologize to everyone I don't respond to promptly (friends and students:  I will try to respond promptly to you).

Not good news for cat owners

Yikes!

Philosophical Gourmet Report 2014-15 now updated

Here.  This includes the corrected General Philosophy of Science specialty rankings, as well as the link to last year's report and a number of other edits and typos.  The additional content beyond the ranking results won't be on-line until the New Year.

Corrected Philosophy of Science rankings

MOVING TO FRONT, ORIINALLY POSTED DECEMBER 9--WILEY-BLACKWELL reports the corrected version should be on-line at www.philosophicalgourmet.com on December 18.

Brit has sent these to Wiley-Blackwell, we hope it will go live within 48 hours (ignore the extra spaces at various points):

GENERAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (EXCLUDING PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPECIAL SCIENCES)

Group 1 (1-1) (rounded mean of 4.5)

University of Pittsburgh (4.5, 5)

Group 2 (2-9) (rounded mean of 4.0)

Cambridge University (4, 4)
Carnegie-Mellon University (4, 4)
Columbia University (4, 4)
London School of Economics (4, 4)

University of California, Irvine (4, 4)

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (4, 4)
University of Western Ontario (4, 4)
University of Wisconsin, Madison (4, 4)

Group 3 (10-19) (rounded mean of 3.5)

New York University (4, 4)
Ohio State University (3.5, 4)
Oxford University (4, 4)
Stanford University (3.5, 3.5)
University of Bristol (4, 4)
University of California, San Diego (3.5, 3.5)
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (3.5, 3.5)

University of Notre Dame (3.5, 4)
University of Sydney (3.5, 4)
University of Toronto (3.75, 4)

Group 4 (20-37) (rounded mean of 3)

Australian National University (3, 3.5)
City University of New York Graduate Center (3, 3)
Duke University (2.75, 3)
Indiana University, Bloomington (3, 3)
Johns Hopkins University (3, 3.0 & 2.5)
Princeton University (3, 2.5 & 3.0)
Rutgers University, New Brunswick (3.25, 2.5 & 3.5)
University of Arizona (3, 3)
University of British Columbia (3, 3)
University of Durham (3, 3)
University of Leeds (3, 3)
University of Maryland, College Park (3.5, 3.5)
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul (2.75, 2.5 & 3.5)
University of Pennsylvania (3, 3)
University of Texas, Austin (3, 3)
University of Utah (3, 3)
University of Waterloo (3, 4)
Washington University, St. Louis (3, 3)

Additional programs not evaluated this year but recommended for consideration by the Advisory Board:
Ludwig Maximillian University, Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy
University of Exeter
University of Kansas
University of South Carolina

Evaluators: Anna Alexandrova, Roger Ariew, Jeffrey Barrett, David Christensen, Marc Ereshefsky, Daniel Garber, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Gary Gutting, Alan Hajek, Hans Halvorson, Chris Hitchcock, Simon Hutteger, Jenann Ismael, Marc Lange, Barry Loewer, Jill North, John Norton, Samir Okasha, Gualtiero Piccinini , Huw Price, A. Rosenberg, Robert Rupert, Jonathan Schaffer, Lawrence Sklar, Brian Skyrms, Howard Sankey, Kyle Stanford, Michael Strevens, J.D. Trout, David Wallace, Michael Weisberg, Jim Woodward, Christian Wuthrich.

"Prudential" vegetarians less committed than "ethical" ones

Not surprising, I suppose.

This week in "fundamentalist freakouts"

These are amusing.

The 2014 PGR was based on accurate information about Sheffield's Department...

...contrary to the nonsensical innuendo the Department has posted ("the Department is not supplying updates and corrections to the 2014 Philosophy Gourmet Report, and [therefore prospective students] should not assume that this report is based on accurate information").  Indeed, Jenny Saul, Head of Department at Sheffield, supplied a good deal of information and corrections about Sheffield's faculty lists over the summer.   On the other hand, I think it would be reasonable for prospectives not to assume that the claim that, "The Department is widely seen as the friendliest in the country" is based on accurate information. 

Below the fold, the full posting put up by Sheffield to mislead applicants:

2014 Journal of the History of Philosophy Book Prize

This $5,000 prize is awarded this year to my colleague Josef Stern for his book The Matter and Form of Maimonides' Guide (Harvard University Press, 2013).

(Thanks to Debra Nails for the information.)

On Wonder...

...in philosophy and science.

On retinal detachment

Here.

Spiros's open letter to the spouse of an "unemployed philosopher"

Alas, it is that time of year.

Best philosophy books/articles you read this year?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM THE OTHER DAY--MORE SUBMISSIONS WELCOME!

It's the time of year when the media start running "the best books" of the year lists, mostly a mix of best-selling garbage, with an occasional book of merit thrown in.  What books or articles did readers here most enjoy/admire this year?  Please don't just name them, but say something about them, to assist others in assessing whether they'd want to read them too.  (These need not be only philosophy books and articles.)

Colorado, Northwestern developments

Wes Morriston, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Colorado, lambasts the "reckless" Administration:

[W]e were intimidated by an explicit threat to dissolve the department by invoking Regent Policy 4H (the policy on program discontinuance). The idea was to fire everyone, and then hire back some of us. Those lucky enough to be rehired would be rostered (for administrative purposes) in other departments....[T]he threat to shut down the department — which came directly from the Dean's office — had its intended effect on many of my colleagues....

On Dec. 2, the Boulder Faculty Assembly was at long last permitted to discuss some of the pertinent issues. It passed a motion that includes this sentence: "The administration has taken precipitous punitive measures against faculty members without due regard for [the] rules." The group had previously deleted the claim that the administration had "created a sense of fear, insecurity, and distrust among faculty." It is unfortunate that these words were deleted, since they describe exactly what has been done to the philosophy department. Fear, insecurity, and distrust have been the entirely predictable result of administrative posturing and bullying.

The past couple of years have given me a taste of what it must be like to live in a police state. (Think here of malicious gossip taken as gospel, of email surveillance and anonymous reporting, of secret trials and equally secret verdicts.) Faculty members of impeccable character have been afraid to speak out because they fear retaliation against anyone who challenges the narrative being put forward by the administration.

Title IX issues have lately (and quite rightly) received a great deal of attention. But there is another pressing issue on this campus. The community as a whole is endangered when top administrators are permitted to act with reckless disregard for the reputations and careers of both faculty and graduate students.

Meanwhile, from the Northwestern student paper, more on the undergraduate's Title IX suit against the University:

The Medill senior suing Northwestern under Title IX filed a motion Thursday asking the judge who dismissed her lawsuit to reconsider or vacate his decision.

The new motion reveals multiple concerns about philosophy Prof. Peter Ludlow’s sexual conduct toward students that were brought to the University before the student accused him of sexual assault in 2012....

“The newly-discovered evidence clearly establishes that Northwestern was on actual notice of, and had a prior knowledge of, Ludlow’s past misconduct toward young female students and his predisposition to be involved with them in a sexual and questionably inappropriate manner, but failed to monitor or supervise him,” the Medill senior’s motion claims.

Gender and teaching evaluations

Not a surprise.  There's a lot of reasons to be cautious about student evaluations of teaching, this is yet another one.

(Thanks to John Doris for the pointer.)

The new category in the PGR specialty rankings: "Additional programs not evaluated this year but recommended for consideration by the Advisory Board"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM DECEMBER 6--UPDATED

A couple of readers asked about this.  In the past, the Advisory Board would add departments not part of that year's evaluation exercise to the specialty rankings, either based on results from prior years or based on the judgment of experts on the Board (and sometimes based on suggestions by evaluators).  This would entail a good deal of discussion about which grouping into which to place the programs.  This year, some members of the Advisory Board expressed doubts about that practice, and given the severe time pressures we were under to get the content to Wiley-Blackwell in time for it to be available to students (next week!), we decided to simply add a list of recomomended programs that should be considered comparable to those ranked.

UPDATE:  It is important to emphasize that the new listing does not mean the programs so listed are mere "honorable mentions."  All the programs so listed were judged by experts on the Advisory Board to be competitive with the ranked programs; the only difference is that these faculties were not included in the survey.  Any faculty included in the survey was not eligible for such a listing; here we used the scores awarded by the evaluators.  (You can see a list of the faculties evaluated this year here.)

Advertising update

The top two spots on both sides are sold out for January, but there remains one 3rd from the top spot and at least one 4th from the top spot.  February still has one top spot left, as well as 4th spots, and possibly one 3rd spot.  Traffic continues to average well over 10,000 visits per day (and generally over 16,000 page views per day), even allowing for weekends and holidays.

Implicit bias, stereotype threat, and the empirical literature

Several readers have sent this paper, some of which raises a genuine question about the status of psychological findings about implicit bias and stereotype threat to which I'd be interested in hearing from experts.  (The authors clearly have an agenda of their own, and some of their points are rather tendentious, which is why it would be good to hear from other experts about whether their representation of the literature is fair.)   In particular, I'm curious whether any of the claims below the fold are correct:

"The Dark Side of Free Will"

Philosopher Greg Caruso (Corning Community College) discusses.

Divorcing a philosophy faculty from a "Department of Philosophy and Religion"?

A reader writes:

In many state colleges and universities philosophy programs are housed in one department with religious studies. In some of these cases, philosophy faculty would prefer to be in self-standing philosophy departments. To make this change, philosophy faculty must persuade administrators that philosophy programs should be housed in autonomous philosophy departments.  

These philosophers need arguments and data. Here are the questions. What are the particular ways in which the "Philosophy and Religious Studies" combination is problematic? What are the most effective arguments against that combination? (The arguments must appeal to Deans and Provosts.) 

Regarding data, it would help philosophers in this position to know which other philosophy departments around the country were once in combined departments, and it would help to know when the split occurred. Finally, it would also be helpful to know the ways in which those philosophy programs have improved after the separation (perhaps in major recruitment, faculty recruitment and retention, research output, and so on).

Advice/insight/data from readers? 

Two new books in the "Routledge Philosophers" series: Hume and Dewey

Hume by Don Garrett, and Dewey by Steven Fesmire--each will, I expect, be landmark works in their respective areas, as well as terrific for students.  Just in time for the holidays, for your favorite pragmatists, naturalists, and empiricists!

Philosophical Logic Wiki

This looks like it could be useful, as long as it gets enough contributors and folks check it for accuracy (right now it seems a bit mixed).  Necessarily, it omits all-important qualitative information, but for that the PGR is the natural starting point.  (Be advised that the boundaries of "philosophical logic" tend to be more contested than is the norm, so the Wiki can also be useful in linking directly to the precise kinds of work faculty are doing.)

About Noelle McAfee

Noelle McAfee took her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 1990s.  I was one of the placement directors when she was first on the job market, and got a rather irate e-mail from her late in the process, since she felt I had not done enough to help her.  She, in fact, got a tenure-track job at the University of Massachussetts, Lowell, and then, through the SPEP network, eventually landed a few years ago at Emory University, a SPEP bastion.  Well before her move to Emory, McAfee joined the SPEP "Advocacy Committee," which had as its primary purpose counteracting the effect of the PGR that I edited, so her personal vendetta now turned into a professional one.  In that role, McAfee spent years on social media posting lies and misinformation about the PGR and sometimes about me personally.  After awhile, this grew tiresome, and past experience with SPEP miscreants (like John McCumber) had taught me that a firm response usually sufficed to pull them back from the defamatory brink, which it did with McAfee, at least under her own name.  (Sally Haslanger and David Velleman, the two longtime PGR haters, who released my e-mails to McAfee on the web omitted all this history, of course--indeed, they never inquired about it since their aim was to harm me and the PGR, not inform.)  But then it turned out that under the pseudonym "ChrisClaire," McAfee had not only written much of her own entry on Wikipedia, but had also taken to vandalizing the wikipedia page about me (the Wikipedia editors eventually put a stop to her mischief).  A class act.

UPDATE:   I came across the following remarkable exchange from a public Facebook page.  It appears to have been a SPEPPie "circle jerk" (to use the technical term) complaining about me and the PGR, including the fact that I (correctly) called out Linda Alcoff's misconduct regarding the "Climate for Women" fiasco last year.  Into the mix stepped SPEP member Catherine Kemp, a philosopher at Brooklyn College (and a former student of mine at Texas in the law school), who is married to Mitchell Aboulafia, whose efforts to address sexual harassment problems at Penn State led to his being ousted as Chair there.   Professor Kemp wrote:

I believe that [Linda Alcoff's] refusal to back away from the climate-for-women section of the Pluralist Guide compromised her standing as an officer in a national organization of philosophers. The inclusion of Penn State (not to mention Oregon) and the presence of Nancy Tuana and Shannon Sullivan as members of that faculty responsible for the *desirability* of the climate for women at Penn State was (and is) outrageous. Tuana and Sullivan have together done more to harm female graduate students and female junior faculty there than all the men on the faculty taken together, not least because Tuana and Sullivan protect (and protected) a serial harasser among the men. Linda was perfectly well aware of this situation before the Pluralist Guide was published, before she participated in getting SPEP to support it, and before BL laid a post on it....

When we overlook or pretend not to see that our own house is not in order on these important issues, our outreach is less credible, esp. when it is based in part on criticism that amounts to throwing stones in that glass house.

A strong statement, though I can not vouch for the accuracy of the allegations it contains.  Professor Kemp tagged a few other SPEPPies in her post, including Noelle McAfee, who then weighed in as follows:

Noelle McAfee I was tagged to this post but I must say I am not willing to be any party to disparaging other feminist colleagues here. If that's going to go on, I'd just as soon not be tagged.

 Solidarity is, apparently, more important than truth or justice, even justice for victims of sexual harassment.

NOELLE MCAFEE, aka, CHRIS CLAIRE UPDATE:  Following McAfee's policy of not linking, I will comment briefly without linking to her non-response.  McAfee doesn't deny any of my allegations (since they're all true, and as she notes the record of most of her lies and misinformation on the PGR is on her blog, except for the defamatory bits which she wisely removed), except one, namely, that "the Wikipedia editors eventually put a stop to her mischief.”  In fact, after I e-mailed the Wikipedia help desk about the vandalism, she did stop vandalizing the entry, as a high level editor named Kevin Gorman assured me she would.  Even better, McAfee now effectively admits to using the pseudonym "ChrisClaire" (not only to vandalize the entry about me, but to write most of the entry about herself):  after I e-mailed her about her use of the pseudonym "ChrisClaire" to vandalize the wikipedia entry about me, McAfee writes that, "I contacted a high-level editor at Wikipedia [Gorman again] and asked for help."  The "help" she got--besides being told to stop the vandalism and stop writing her own entry--was the information that Wikipedia actually will pay to defend editors who are sued for defamation--not an issue in this instance, but a remarkable policy nonetheless which readers should keep in mind the next time Wikipedia asks for donations.

4/2/16 UPDATE:   Remarkably, "Lyin' Noelle" (to coin a name) is still pretending she's not ChrisClaire88, who is responsible for one third of all the 40 or so edits on her own entry on Wikipedia.  (It's true her friend Kevin Gorman [recently ousted, it appears, from his senior editorial role at Wikipedia due to misconduct] wrote other parts of the entry, but I think Lyin' Noelle left out the part about the friendship.)  Having no better retort, Lyin' Noelle now resorts to the defense you did it too!  My entry on Wikipedia has been edited some 1000 times, over the last decade or so, by God knows who.  There was so much malicious editing by miscreants like Noelle, that the entry has been "locked" for years (meaning, I think, that unless you have a registered account, as ChrisClaire88 does, your edits have to be pre-approved, or something like that).  Lyin' Noelle, with her "ChrisClaire88" hat on, was one of those malicious editors, and I definitely reversed her edits, twice, when I learned of them--and I notified Wikipedia at the time that I had done so, and then they made her stop.   (Once or twice years ago, I tried correcting straight up factual errors in my entry, to no avail, so gave up.  So 4 edits out of 1,000, that's me!)  When I discovered vandalism, I would occasionally write to Wikipedia about it, and the editors would generally fix things, and that's also why they eventually locked the entry.  (Wikipedia is notorious for being the first place anyone with a grievance turns to exact revenge.)  But Lyin' Noelle, ie., ChrisClaire88, knows all this.  

Earlier PGRs at the Wiley-Blackwell site

Wiley-Blackwell reports they do have archived versions of them, and will restore the links to them from the main page of the new PGR.  We have asked them to prioritize this.  It is a new crew at Wiley-Blackwell working on the PGR this time, so they don't have the benefit of past experience with the report.

Philosophy should not only be taught in secondary (high) schools...

...it should pervade the curriculum.

(Thanks to Andy West for the pointer.)

Williamson on the "transformation of analytic philosophy"

This is a very good read, a well-informed (as one would expect) and appropriately opionated account of developments, especially in the post-WWII period, covering, inter alia, the decline of Wittgenstein's influence, the return of metaphysics, the shift from philosophy of language to philosophy of mind in the 1980s, the rise and fall of Davidson and Dummett, the contributions of Lewis, Kripke, Grice and many others.  As one would expect, the story ends with a vindication of the centrality of logic, metaphysics, and a kind of philosophy of language to philosophical inquiry.

NY Times's moral grandstanding on the CIA torture report

What the editorial says seems right--in shorter form, the U.S. is a lawless, criminal nation on the international scene, but we all knew that, right?--but what it omits is the role the Times, like most of the mainstream media in the US played, in shilling for war and offering apologetics for criminality until such apologetics could no longer be sustained.  After all, the report describes standard operating procedure of the CIA for decades.

UPDATE:  Some highlights of American tax dollars at work.  As with most important moral questions, there were no hard philosophical questions here.

Remembering December 7, 1941

Sorry I missed this two days ago, but Robert Paul Wolff's comments explain the real meaning of the "day that will live in infamy."

Georgia State's Jessica Berry talks about Pyrrhonian Skepticism at....

...Partially Examined Life.

(Thanks to Mark Linsenmayer for the pointer.)

Earlier PGRs will return to the Wiley-Blackwell site!

The links to the 2011, 2009 etc. Report seem to have been lost during the transition to the 2014 Report.  This is out of our control, but Brit and I have notified the Wiley-Blackwell folks!

The Ideology System at work

Bad billionaires.

Perspective on the PGR from a recent PhD graduate

A young philosopher, who graduated from a top 20 department and is currently in a post-doc, writes:

I write to offer a short note of thanks and support for your work on the PGR. As a young student I had absolutely no idea what I was doing when looking at graduate programs, and neither did any of my professors. Looking back now, it is embarrassing and comical how I thought it best to go about finding a graduate program until coming across the PGR.  I know dozens of other young philosophers for whom that is also the case. The PGR is not perfect, but I simply do not understand the vitriolic criticisms aimed at your editorship and the rankings themselves. It pools lots of specialized knowledge that very few people in their early twenties could otherwise attain at such a low cost.  The PGR was vital for me if I was ever to have a shot at a career in philosophy. (Perhaps the critics think that people like me should not have had a shot at a career?) Whatever else, I hope you know how helpful it has been to a generation of young people trying to make a career out of philosophy--people who otherwise would have had almost no chance of doing so given their upbringing and undergraduate education.

The "vitriolic criticsms" are understandable and also unrepresentative--obviously the critics have tremendous incentives to be a salient presence on social media, given the huge influence the PGR actually has in the real world.  As I've noted before, it's important not to be misled by the volume and persistence of the critics--pay attention to who they are, where they teach, where they earned their PhD, this will usually tell you more about what's really going on.  Not all of them have self-serving motives*, to be sure--some just have no judgment (vide Velleman).

But those of us who work on the PGR (which takes hundreds of hours to prepare) appreciate messages like these, of which I have hundreds and hundreds and which I periodically share with the Advisory Board.  Going forward, these words of support and appreciation should go to Brit Brogaard, without whom the 2014 PGR would not have happened.

*Some are also pathologically dishonest, and are getting increasingly desperate now that the PGR is out.  The most amusing is the former SPEP Advocacy Committee member who purports to quote me saying, "Reputation tends to be yesterday’s news–what happened 25 years ago," without noting that I was discussing the awful U.S. News surveys of law schools, which are random surveys (not suveys of experts) and which provide the respondents with no information at all--of course, those kinds of surveys are yesterday's news.  The other big difference between academic law and academic philosophy is that in the former there is far less consensus on scholarly paradigms than in the latter. 

ADDENDUM:  My friend Jessica Wilson on Facebook expressed skepticism about the latter point, but based on her knowledge of philosophy not academic law in the US.  As I pointed out to her, and is perhaps worth sharing, Kieran Healy's research found remarkable convergence in overall evaluations of programs across almost all areas of philosophical specialization--that's the evidence about consensus I had in mind [evidence not refuted by noting that at the margins there are dissenters from the consensus, obviously].  By contrast, there is no such consensus in academic law:  it's at the core of the field, not the margins.  The explanation is simple:  American law schools these days are made up of economists, historians, philosophers, political scientists, traditional doctrinalist lawyers, critical theorists and others, and their views of what work is good work is as diverse as one would expect.  To do a meaningful reputational survey under these conditions would be even more work than the PGR has been! 

Some PGR mistakes--including omission of Michigan from Phil of Science (also LSE, Notre Dame)

Thanks to alert readers for already catching some typos and transcription errors.  (You may e-mail errors to me or Brit.)  The most serious one is that the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor was wrongly omitted from the General Philosophy of Science ranking, due to a transcription error--Michigan in fact had a rounded mean of 4.0 and a median and mode of 4.0 in this specialty, as one might have expected.   (Thanks to Brad Wray for flagging the surprising omission for us.)

ADDENDUM:  And LSE has a rounded mean of 4.0 and University of Notre Dame had a rounded mean of 3.5 in Philosophy of Science as well.  Apologies.  Brit is double-checking the scores in this category, which hopefully is the only one with transcription errors of this magnitude.

"Visualizing Philosophy Rankings"

The sociologist Kieran Healy (Duke) discusses the work he generously did for the new PGR.

Who majored in philosophy?

A poster, courtesy of Catherine Nolan, a PhD student at Buffalo.  She writes:

Some people commonly found in lists of philosophy majors (e.g. Woody Allen, David Duchovny) aren't on this poster because I couldn't find evidence to back up such claims.  If anyone finds that there are other errors in this poster, please have them contact me at [email protected] and I'll make sure to update it. 

This poster can be printed as a 20"x32" poster; another practical size is 11"x17.6", but it can be scaled to other sizes as well.

UPDATE:  Apparently the dropbox site was overwhelmed by the volume of traffic; Ms. Nolan has relocated the poster here.

Sociology of philosophy?

Yes, we need more of it, though the results are unlikely to increase confidence in many current philosophical fashions.

Reflections on lying...

...from philosopher Jerry Dworkin.

Annals of people with too much time on their hands: "The Beatles never existed as presented"

Seriously, who spends their time on stuff like this?

Number of PhDs awarded in U.S. continues to increase across all fields

Interesting data via IHE.

Academic book costs...

...are being discussed at the Chinese and Comparative Philosophy blog.

(Thanks to Manyul Im for the pointer.)

How many of those misled by the boycott statement actually boycotted the PGR?

As I noted awhile back, about 55 nominated evaluators actually pledged to boycott the PGR until I was ousted based on the misrepresentations circulated by the boycott organizers (signatories had no way to know they were misrepresentations, as I also remarked previously).  We sent out about 560 evaluations, of which at least 500 I'd estimate got through (this is based partly on what we learned [e.g., hearing from folks after the surveys were over that we had used a rarely checked e-mail address, or that the spam filter ate the invitation etc.] and partly on past experience). 

Brit heard from about five or six dozen invited evaluators declining; a half-dozen of them indicated that their reasons were related to the boycott or doubts about rankings, while the rest pointed to unfortunate timing (e.g., middle of job search season, other work obligations, personal crises etc.) and the unusually short time frame for this year's survey.  (A dozen or more even went out of their way to say that their inability to participate had nothing to do with the smear campaign or doubts about the PGR.)  Several signatories to the boycott statement did participate in the surveys (e.g., Daniel Garber, Eleonore Stump, Mark Scrhoeder, among others), though I haven't tallied up how many precisely since it was a long list, mostly of people who had not been invited to be evaluators (and likely never would be--there's an amusing conceptual question here, can you "boycott" an event to which you are not and never will be invited?).

What to conclude from this?  I don't really know.  I would assume the majority of the 55 who signed and who did not in the end participate were boycotting (that would certainly explain almsot all of the approximate decline in responses compared to 2011--from about 295 to 230); hopefully, they will participate in the future.  But the timing of this year's PGR--in the middle of term and for a shorter time than in the past--also affected the response rate.  None of this much matters; we clearly had more than enough respondents, a couple hundred philosophers of distinction both junior and senior, and across enough different fields, to explain why the results are consistent with past surveys which had somewhat more respondents.

Philosophical Gourmet Report ranking results will go live tomorrow

Because of the delayed start to this year's surveys, the only material that will be on-line tomorrow will be the overall and specialty rankings, on the theory that this will be most useful to students trying to identify the programs to which to apply.  The other updated content will be added over the next month or so.

Reporting the overrall PGR results: confidence intervals, histograms, plots etc.

The PGR aggregates the judgments of a panel of field experts into a ranking of philosophy faculties. It is desirable to give users of the guide an accurate sense of the degree of consensus among respondents about the departments ranked in the survey. In practice this means showing where departments rank but also providing information about the degree of consensus among raters. The Report has long done this numerically by reporting several measures of central tendency in the rankings (e.g., mean, median, mode), but for this edition we decided to go beyond this. 

Originally, we thought it would be useful to calculate confidence intervals (CIs) for the mean scores. These would show a range around each department's mean scores, giving some information about the precision of the estimate. However, two issues arose. First, the design of the PGR makes correctly calculating CIs a little tricky. Specifically, raters rate many departments and not all raters rate all departments. This wrinkle in the design can be accommodated by various statistical methods (which we investigated). But there is more than one way to do this calculation and we did not want the precise method chosen to become a matter of pointless controversy. Second, and more important, the PGR has long reported mean ratings rounded off to one decimal place (4.2, 3.7, etc), in part so as not to encourage invidious comparisons. To be properly informative, the CI calculation would have to be done on the raw scores, and the range reported to two decimal places. Calculating CIs with pre-rounded mean scores would have given inaccurate results. Similarly, calculating CIs on the raw scores and then subsequently rounding the means and the ranges would also give inaccurate intervals. In both cases this would defeat the purpose of calculating accurate intervals. 

In the end we decided to maintain consistency with earlier surveys and report mean scores to one decimal place, as has long been the PGR’s practice. However, we were still committed to conveying accurate and useful information on the range of rater assessments of departments. Therefore in this edition, for the first time, we are providing detailed figures showing the distribution of votes for all departments in the overall rankings. We present them as histograms and as kernel density plots. The interpretation of both kinds of figure will be explained in the “Note on the Figures” accompanying the report. We feel these visualizations convey the necessary information in a detailed and accessible way.  (Brit and I would especially like to thank Kieran Healy for his assistance in preparing the figures.)

Cappelen from St. Andrews to Oslo, plus other hires

Øystein Linnebo writes:

Herman Cappelen, currently Arche Chair at the university of St Andrews and Director of the Arche Philosophical Research Centre, has accepted a position as professor at the University of Oslo, starting August 2015. In Oslo, Cappelen will also be a research director at the Centre for the study of mind in Nature (CSMN). He will retain a part-time continuing position at St Andrews.

Additionally, the University of Oslo has hired four new Professorial Fellows, who will all spend four weeks a year in Oslo: Carla Bagnoli (University of Modena), Berit Brogaard (University of Miami), Kristin Gjesdal (Temple University), and Agustin Rayo (MIT).

(We knew that Cappelen would be moving to Oslo, so he was not included among the full-time faculty at St Andrews during the recently concluded PGR surveys.)

How infantile is Ed Kazarian?

You decide, but Prof. Karzarian is certainly giving John Protevi a run for the money!  I reprint this amusing display in whole below the fold, since, as several who sent it to me observed, it may not last:

LA Review of Books reviews a new novel by Ian McEwan...

...and Why Tolerate Religion? together!