It's rational for hiring schools to consider pedigree, as we've discussed on many prior occasions. In the PGR era, everyone knows that an Ivy League name is compatible with being a top 30 or a top 5 department, and students and more faculty know that excellence in various specialties does not track "brand name" of the university, but rather faculty excellence in the subfield.
Harvard, because it has the "brand name," has perhaps had more latitude in ignoring pre-PGR pedigree factors than other departments, and has done so with remarkable success. Consider that the current tenure-track faculty includes PhDs from Wisconsin and UC Riverside, and mid-career tenured faculty with PhDs from Penn and UC Irvine. I know of no other top ten department with as many faculty with PhDs from non-top 10 programs. Yet in most of these cases, the faculty were hired from programs that were at the very top in the PGR specialties at the time (e.g., UC Riverside in Continental philosophy, UC Irvine in early modern).
That other top departments do less of this tells us that there remain too many departments doing "pedigree" hiring in the pejorative sense, although the label "pedigree" often misdescribes what is going on: sometimes the better label would be "nepotistic" hiring in which departments hire the students (i.e, friends) of their own former teachers, with whom they remain friends. Certainly in fields with low cognitive content, like philosophy, it's hard to see how we can completely eliminate such considerations. But the field should take note of what Harvard has done, not by ignoring pedigree, but by understanding that there are different pedigrees by which a young scholar can emerge. That's why the PGR rankings are helpful for hiring departments at all kinds of colleges and universities: if you want a specialist in philosophy of physics, you should be looking harder at UC Irvine grads than at most Ivy League grads; if you want a specialist in medieval philosophy, Notre Dame is a far more important program for your search than most of the Ivy League as well; if you want a philosopher of biology, Wisconsin or Penn will be a more promising source than Princeton, Harvard, Yale, not to mention Berkeley, Michigan and Chicago; if you want a specialist in 19th-century Continental philosophy or philosophy of action, UC Riverside will loom larger than most "brand name" departments. These are important facts that the PGR makes available to a wide audience.
The two top programs in our discipline are, of course, NYU and Rutgers, something no one would have believed possible in the 1970s. At the same time the "top programs" in a long line of subfields--not just those noted above, but also philosophy of religion, ancient philosophy, decision theory, philosophy of mathematics and others--are to be found well outside the mindless U.S. News hierarchy of universities.
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