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!
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