Professor Christopher Pynes asked me to share the following, which I am happy to do:
I would like to thank Dr. Berit Brogaard for her essential work with the PGR in 2014 and 2017.
The Brogaard/Jennings joint statement omits the fact that this past summer and fall Dr. Brogaard informed me she would be unavailable during two major and extended periods. These two periods included the bulk of the PGR work: first, compiling and revising faculty lists, updating evaluator emails and category list, and the second period in which we ran the survey and generated the report. This put almost the entire burden of producing the 2021-2022 Report on me (with the assistance of the Advisory Board).
On September 27th Professor Brogaard informed me of her APDA advisory board membership, which she equated with our PGR co-editorship. The contract Brit and I signed with Wiley-Blackwell has always included a non-competition clause, and based on the contract language and Brit’s characterization of her work with the APDA, I believed this work violated that contract. As such, I asked Wiley-Blackwell to review our contract and advise us on how to proceed. Wiley-Blackwell determined Professor Brogaard’s work on the APDA did violate the non-competition clause in our contract. My only concern was ensuring the integrity of the PGR and our work on it.
Until a few days ago, I was under the impression that Wiley-Blackwell was negotiating with Professor Brogaard on how to move forward as an editorial team. I emailed Dr. Brogaard as recently as November 4th, asking if she could attend to some editorial matters with the advisory board. She wrote back that she would. She hasn't communicated with me since, and I subsequently worked with the Advisory Board to produce the 2021-2022 PGR.
The PGR is a valuable resource for students, faculty, and departments in the profession. During my time as co-editor, I have been impressed by the honesty and conscientiousness of the evaluators who take time to participate in the process. Having said that, I know that some aspects of the process seems opaque. I am creating a FAQs page to answer questions I get asked about the process from start to finish, for example: who gets invited, how programs are selected, and how the survey is run. Additionally, please reach out to me if you have questions and suggestions for how to improve future versions of the report. Finally, I want to thank the Advisory Board and all those faculty who have taken the time to take the survey over the years.
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