The main thing that strikes me in looking at the new U.S. overall "top 50" posted yesterday by Professor Pynes is how almost all the changes from the 2014 Report reflect actual changes in the interim. For example (and starting near the top and working down):
MIT's move from 13th to 7th: that's a bit stronger than I would have predicted, but MIT did make two lateral hires in the interim (Tamar Schapiro from Stanford, Miriam Schoenfeld from Texas), as well as junior hires, and two faculty were tenured and/or promoted (Casper Hare, Brad Skow).
USC's move from 8th (tied with Stanford) to 7th (tied with MIT): I had predicted this awhile ago, based on the senior hire of David Wallace, the philosopher of physics, from Oxford.
Harvard's drop from 6th to 9th: Christine Korsgaard went on phased retirement, Frances Kamm left for Rutgers, and Matt Boyle left for Chicago. (Chicago's position was unchanged, as in the interim, Josef Stern retired, and James Conant went to a half-time position while taking up a post at Leipzig).
CUNY's move from 16th to 14th (joining Arizona and North Carolina): CUNY added Miranda Fricker from Sheffield and Charles Mills from Northwestern in the interim.
UCSD's move from 23rd to 20th (but, more significantly, leaping ahead of Chicago and Wisconsin): UCSD made several tenured and junior hires in the interim, including the Kant scholar Lucy Allais and the philosopher of action Manuel Vargas (as well as retaining Clinton Tolley [Kant, phenomenology, history of analytic] in the face of a senior offer from Chicago).
UC Irvine and Wash U/St. Louis both moved from 24th to 21st (in both cases tied with other places): UC Irvine made a number of appointments, including Duncan Pritchard from Edinburgh, while Wash U added Jonathan Kvanvig from Missouri.
Cornell dropped from 17th to 25th, a bit steeper than I would have guessed, but in the interim, they lost Andrew Chignell (initially to Penn) and Jill North and Ted Sider (to Rutgers). Some faculty phasing into retirement last time (Gail Fine, Richard Boyd) also retired fully.
Miami dropped from 31st to the cluster below (now all ranked 36th) with the departures of Thomasson and Lewis to Dartmouth.
Maryland's drop (31 to 40) was steeper than expected, but they did lose two prominent senior faculty since 2014: the philosopher of physics Matias Frisch (who went to Hannover) and the philosopher of language Paul Pietroski (who went to Rutgers). Still, with Peter Carruthers, Christopher Morris, Patricia Greenspan, Jerrold Levinson, among other distinguished senior faculty, I would have expected a stronger showing.
Two programs made the top 50 this time, Boston University and (for the first time) Texas A&M. BU is expecting to recruit the Kant/Hegel scholar Sally Sedgwick at the senior ranks from UIC (she is expected to start in January 2019, but the final appointment has not been approved--she was listed with BU, rather than UIC), and tenured several younger faculty whose work is becoming better-known (e.g., Paul Katsafanas, Daniel Star). Texas A&M had just recruited Kenny Easwaran (formal epistemology, decision theory) from USC at the time of the last survey, but his star continues to rise; they also added, at the senior level, the decision theorist Martin Peterson (thus playing to their new strength in the area). In addition, Jose Bermudez, the prominent philosopher of mind and cognitive science, had been listed as primarily in administration in 2014 (since he was then a Dean), but he has since returned to the faculty and just published a major new book in his field.
Missouri slipped out of the top 50, having lost, since 2014, both Kvanvig (to Wash U) and Matthew McGrath (to Rutgers). Rice also slipped out of the top 50, which is the one move I find slightly inexplicable. The scholar of early modern philosophy, Mark Kulstad, did retire since 2014, and they've had a bit of movement at the junior ranks (with some losses, but also some hires), but that slippage strikes me as just noise.
There are some other minor changes I may comment on subsequently, but it's good to see that evaluators are overall clearly paying attention and responding to the actual faculty rosters.
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