It's amusing when the critics of the philosophy rankings inadvertently reveal the need for them

A reader flagged for me the following gem from cyberspace by one David Hyder, who opined as follows:

While I will only comment here on one of my own subfields, Kant, quite a bit can be said.

1. Of the top-ranked programs, only one, Brown, actually has a leading Kant-scholar (Guyer) worth studying with. But he is close to retirement.
2. The other leading Kant scholar in US/UK has now returned to Paris.
3. Princeton has no Kant coverage. None. Princeton has been in the news recently only for linking Kant to critical race theory.
4. This is traceable to the evaluators. Most are associated with the “top ranked”programs themselves.

Princeton, in fact, has not one, but two, of the leading Kant scholars of their generation:  Andrew Chignell and Desmond Hogan.  (One could ask Paul Guyer, even.)   Among the other top-ranked programs for Kant studies that Professor Hyder deems unworthy are Stanford University (take that Lanier Anderson and Michael Friedman!), University of California at San Diego (what do you know, Clinton Tolley and Eric Watkins?), and the University of Pittsburgh (so much for Stephen Engstrom and Nandi Theunissen).    Professor Guyer, by the way, is 73; I'm sure if he is about to retire he will so inform prospective students. 

Imagine how misled Professor Hyder's students would be if they had only his ill-informed advice to rely upon?   One of the goals of the PGR is to help those students who are hostage to faculty whose opinions are idiosyncratic, and who don't know enough to realize how bad their advice is.

(As an aside, the evaluators for the Kant category--whom Professor Hyder also disparages, even though their collective judgment is far superior to his individual opinion--were Andrew Chignell [Princeton], Steven Crowell [Rice], Paul Franks [Yale], Paul Guyer [Brown], Pierre Keller [UC Riverside], Edwin McCann [USC], Yitzhak Melamed [Johns Hopkins], Karin Nisenbaum [Syracuse], Ian Proops [Texas], Michael Rosen [Harvard], Karl Schafer [Texas], Eric Watkins [UC San Diego], Allen Wood [Indiana].  Evaluators can not score their own school, or the school from which they received a PhD.)