Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

A note on Carolyn Dicey Jennings and her compilation of placement data

Professor Jennings (UC Merced) gets credit for being the only person to not simply grouse about the PGR rankings (although she does plenty of that), but to actually try to offer an alternative resource--kudos to her for that.   The job placement data she and her team collect are useful, but she chooses to present some of it in a tendentious and misleading way, as I (and others) have noted before:  she treats placement success as landing a tenure-track job your first year out on the market, thus failing to distinguish between getting a postoc (even a fabulous postdoc) and getting nothing.  As many have also noted ad nauseam, by now, job placement data is a backward-looking measure:  Southern California didn't have very good job placement when the PGR first recorded the department's rise, now it does (which is why PGR rank correlates pretty well with tenure-track placement a few years later). I would urge students to examine the raw data on placement, not the tendentious rating of placement success.  (Of course, the reason all departments post placement data is because I "cajoled" them into doing so twenty years ago.)

The "student reputation" data Jennings et al. collect, by contrast, is far more dubious. 

Students should be aware that Professor Jennings has a history of producing extremely misleading placement rankings; of trying to use data to attack her enemies; and of not having a good command of statistics (here and here).   The recent work, fortunately, looks better, subject to the reservations noted above.

New philosophy rankings released

No, not the ones that matter, but a new effort to rank philosophy programs based on the percentage of faculty and graduate students who "think correctly" (the "TCR" for short) (Linda Alcoff tried this a number of years ago, but it failed.)   The top five programs in the new TCR rankings are British Columbia, UC Merced, Southern California (but ignore Scott, he'll retire soon), and the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature Departments at Berkeley.  There may be some controversy about the fact that MIT was apparently dropped from the survey after the organizers realized that Alex "Bad, Lazy Philosophy Guy" Byrne taught there.

The editors of this new effort are "Smarmy" Jonathan Ichikawa and Carolyn "Dicey indeed" Jennings; they surveyed more than 300 Twitter users to come up with these results.  You can read the full rankings here.

On being the victim of a stalker, and then being defamed for the stalker's crime

In 2016, I was the victim of a stalker who tried to frame me for a crime; I sought help from the police and spent time and money on lawyers and forensic investigators trying to identify the perpetrator, without success. Anyone paying attention at the time realized that I was also a victim, but, unfortunately, plenty of folks on social media still recklessly defame me for the stalker's crimes.  Some of them, happily, recant when confronted with the evidence.  Hopefully, by putting the evidence in one place (below), others will be more careful. 

In 2014, I was involved in a dispute with several other philosophy professors about my well-known philosophy rankings; the details of the dispute do not matter, but they are here for anyone curious. 

Nearly two years after this dispute, some maniac decided to send excrement in the mail to several of those involved in the 2014 dispute with me.  (The best news account came from the CBC.)   One of the envelopes had a return address of my law school; it was mailed on June 23, 2016 from the very large Chicago zip code that includes O'Hare airport.  Put aside that criminals usually don't volunteer their work address.  It was a matter of public record that I was speaking at a conference in Germany on June 24, so the person stalking me obviously thought it would further help frame me to post it the day before.  What the stalker didn't know was that I had left for Germany on June 22, so was not even in the country on June 23.

To those without malice towards me, it was obvious I had nothing to do with this vile stunt.   The philosopher David Velleman (then at NYU), who had the misfortune to get such a package, was the first to alert me to it in an August 27, 2016 e-mail:

A few people have received packages of excrement from someone using your law-school address.... I assume it can't be you -- which means that someone is trying to embarrass you. I don't know if there's anything you can do about it, but I thought you would want to know. Some of the recipients have reported the packages to the police.

The philosopher David Wallace (Pittsburgh), responding to reckless anonymous accusations against me on another blog, wrote:  

Are people seriously supposing either that, (a) Leiter himself is sending offensive and illegal packages to his adversaries and including his own return address; or that (b) overly radical allies of Leiter, inspired by and in agreement with his views but thinking that he’s being too moderate in his actions, decide to act on his behalf *and to frame him for the action*?  

I don’t really see any plausible way of interpreting this as anything other than third-party malice....

A law blogger at the Washington Post, noting the same facts as Wallace, agreed that someone was "trying to frame or embarrass" me, since "whoever sent the packages was quite ham-handed in their efforts to connect them to Leiter."

Several recipients, correctly, reported these packages to the police.  The police never contacted me about this, since I was never a suspect.  My lawyers also retained a forensic handwriting expert who confirmed from media photos of two different envelopes that the handwriting was the same.  Further investigation led us to try to secure handwriting samples from three individuals.  Only one complied:  philosopher David Barnett, formerly of the University of Colorado.  Barnett had admitted to others (and subsequently to me) that he had sent excrement in the mail in the past (seriously!).   His handwriting was not, however, a match to that on the envelopes.  Another person my lawyers contacted was an alleged recipient of one of the envelopes, who never responded.  A final person, someone connected to both law and philosophy (and Chicago), first lied to my lawyers about his history of cyber-stalking me, then, subsequently, refused to provide a handwriting sample as well.  For additional details, see the last update here.  My lawyers advised me that we did not yet have enough to proceed against anyone. 

Falsely accusing someone of a crime is defamation.  It's also unethical and malicious, adding insult to injury.  I hope it stops.

PGR rank and tenure-track placement down the line

This is about what one would expect:  a strong but not perfect correlation between PGR rank and later tenure-stream placement.  Unlike some others, Professor Weisberg sensibly looks at  the correlation between PGR rank in 2006 with those who got PhDs six to eight years later, i.e., those who were relying on the 2006 rankings in choosing programs (an example of an earlier effort that wasn't so sensible).

Placement in PhD-granting programs in the new academic job placement report

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 3

I've started to look a bit more at the data from the new placement analysis (commissioned and paid for by the APA no less), and there were plainly some peculiar choices made in how to frame the data.  As David Chalmers points out, post-docs are lumped in with fixed term appointments, adjuncting, and VAPs, i.e., as simply "not permanent appointments."  That's extraordinary, given that some who take them postpone tenure-track jobs to do so, and many use them to launch into highly competitive tenure-track positions.  Even more curious was the decision to create a "placement ranking" based on "permanent placement" without regard to school quality.  Three of the schools in this "top ten" for permament placement--University of Virginia, University of Florida, and University of Tennessee--also have 0% of their graduates placed into PhD-granting programs.  (I'll have more to say about their permanent placements, below.)  By contrast, taking the report's data at face value (I can not represent that this is safe to do, but let's assume it is), here's how a ranking of U.S. programs by placement of graduates into PhD-granting programs (i.e., research universities and departments) would look (for schools with  at least 20% placement into PhD programs):

1.  University of California, Berkeley (59%)                               

2.  University of Pittsburgh (HPS) (43%)                                    

3.  Rutgers University, New Brunswick (36%)          

3.  Princeton University (36%)

5.  Massachussetts Institute of Technology (35%)

6.  Carnegie-Mellon University (33%)

7.  Harvard University (31%)

7.  New York University (31%)                                                          

7.  University of California, Irvine (Logic & Philosophy of Science) (31%)

10. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (26%)

11. University of Pennsylvania (25%)

12. University of Chicago (24%)

12. Yale University (24%)

14. Columbia University (23%)

15. Stanford University (21%)

15. University of Arizona (21%)

17. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (20%)

17. University of Southern California (20%)

Of course, this list looks a lot more like the PGR, especially when you factor in the specialty rankings which capture the niches of excellence at places like Irvine's LPS and Carnegie-Mellon. 

Academic job placement report

Here it is.  I've not had a chance to examine it, though the lead author on the report has an uneven track record and I had heard complaints from others that the placement data was incomplete, but it may be that has been rectified in the final version.  In any case, comments are open for those who have had a chance to examine the report to weigh in with the positives and negatives, what's interesting and useful, what's less interesting or dubious, etc.

There is no bottom to vile in cyberspace (October 6)

Several months ago, I learned, via the Chair of the Philosophy Department at British Columbia, that my old pal Carrie Jenkins had received an "offensive" package, and that the return address consisted in a mangled version of my Law School's address and a pseudonym attributed to me by a law blogger who had championed the idea that "law school is a scam" and whom I had mercilessly criticized for years (a short and sweet explanation of the whole background is here).  That was weird, but I didn't think much of it, and no information about the "offensive" content was shared.

Then, in late August, David Velleman wrote to me as follows:

> From: David Velleman [mailto:[email protected]]

> Sent: Saturday, August 27, 2016 3:17 PM

> To: Leiter, Brian <[email protected]>

> Subject: An imposter

> Dear Brian,

> A few people have received packages of excrement from someone using your law-school address and a name widely [sic] believed to be your pseudonym. I assume it can't be you -- which means that someone is trying to embarrass you. I don't know if there's anything you can do about it, but I thought you would want to know. Some of the recipients have reported the packages to the police.

> David

APA placement data project

The website has been updated so that it is searchable in various ways.  Unfortunately, there's still no distinction between the kinds of tenure-track jobs graduates secure, but perhaps that will come.  (See, e.g., this.)  Still, there is useful information here, including about AOS by department.  A caveat:  I've not double-checked any of this for accuracy, but perhaps someone will.

Jennings v. Wallace, Part II

Following up on this, more amusement:

How "professional" is Carolyn Dicey Jennings's data analysis?

Jenny Saul (Sheffield) declared Prof. Jennings "a professional data guru."  How professional?  This exchange between her and David Wallace (Oxford) is instructive.  Prof. Wallace starts by quoting Jennings's attempt to attack me with her data:

 

David Wallace said...

"9 of the 11 programs mentioned by Brian have a higher percentage of either women graduates or non-white (citizen/permanent resident) graduates than the percentage for all of the covered programs for this time period. "

If you picked 11 programs at random, on average 8.25 would have a higher percentage of either women graduates or non-white (citizen/permanent resident) graduates than the percentage for all of the covered programs for this time period. So by itself that isn't a persuasive argument.

Reply 18 January 2016 at 14:14

 

Carolyn Dicey Jennings said in reply to David Wallace...

Here is another way of looking at this: 32 of the 97 (33%) programs have neither a higher percentage of women graduates than the overall percentage nor a higher percentage of non-white graduates, whereas only 2 of the 11 (18%) programs listed by Brian Leiter have this quality. Conversely, 67% of all programs have one or the other feature, whereas 82% of the programs from this list have one or the other feature. To me, this is a striking difference. 

Reply 18 January 2016 at 14:36 

 

David Wallace said...

"To me, this is a striking difference."

To me, it's noise. Or to be more accurate, those numbers by themselves don't obviously suggest anything but noise. (11 is a small sample.) You'd need to look at the actual scale of the deviation, institution by institution, to show there's something more interesting going on.

At this point I'd come back to my comment at Feminist Philosophers: this is driven by 3 of the 11 that really do have a statistically significant excess of women and non-whites. The other 8, collectively, are below average.

 

Reply 18 January 2016 at 14:50

Actually, no one has recommended closing programs "that better serve women and minorities in philosophy"...

...but in keeping with the juvenile dishonesty and dissembling with which we've all grown familiar in the philosophy blogosphere, Jenny Saul (Sheffield) and Justin Weinberg (South Carolina) both frames it that way (Saul, of course, without posting a link to the actual discussions about PhD programs that should probably close, since that degree of courtesy and honesty would be too difficult).  Their purported source is Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC Merced), who both links to my discussion and makes clear that her "provocative" question was not my question:

One striking feature of these lists is how many of the programs show up on Brian Leiter's list of PhD programs "whose existence is not easy to explain."  A provocative rhetorical question follows: Should we be closing PhD programs that better serve women and minorities in philosophy?

"How many of the programs" show up?  Ironically, of the 40 programs she lists based on percentage of non-white graduates, just three were on the lists of PhD programs whose rationale for existing I queried, while of the 41 programs she listed based on percentage of female graduates, only seven were on my list.  The fact that some mediocre PhD programs enroll significant numbers of women and minorities ought, in a rational world, be all the more reason to be concerned, since to "better serve" underrepresented populations it is not enough to enroll them, one must give them good educations and launch them on the path to securing the gainful academic employment that the vast majority of them no doubt seek.   So the answer to Prof. Jennings's "provocative" question is easy:  PhD programs that actually "better serve" their students, including women and minorities, should not be closed, but there's no evidence any of the programs on her list are such programs.

What does all this tell us?  It tells us, of course, that discussing the fact that there are too many PhD programs in philosophy in the U.S. touches a nerve, so much so that certain people will seize the opportunity to distort the discussion in any way possible. 

UPDATE:  David Wallace (Oxford) called out Saul's slimy dishonesty in the first comment, and she has now made a slight edit to the original misleading framing.

ANOTHER:  A reader points out that on Twitter, Prof. Jennings was less discreet about her actual purpose.  This is hardly surprising given her track record.

AND ONE MORE:  Prof. Weinberg, to his credit, has linked to this rejoinder from his "heap of links," so I withdraw the suggestion that he meant to mislead anyone.

WALLACE V. JENNINGS:  This is instructive about Prof. Jennings' reliability:  here and here.

More thoughts on factors affecting job placement in philosophy

Interesting e-mail from a senior philosopher who earned a PhD at a top 50 department:

One thing that bothers me about the analysis that CDJ [Carolyn Dicey Jennings] presents, and I agree with you that it doesn't make a lot of sense, is that unlike the PGR which is just about faculty quality as it guides placement, placement itself is about candidate quality.  Sometimes well trained candidates are just bad interviews.  Sometimes people decide they don't want to do philosophy after graduate school.  Sometimes people get married and don't want to live in another region of the country.  Some people don't want to risk a wandering life on the job market.  Lots of things happen that are beyond the control of the program.  And after doing an adjunct search this year, those are not unreasonable things to think as a candidate (from a marginal program at least).  The pool of candidates for our shitty 4/4 low paying job in the middle of nowhere was amazing.

When I was a graduate student at [school name omitted], we hired a Ph.D. [from a top five department] and she told me once there that you aren't allowed to drop out of the program.  She said that they will give you every opportunity to get your life together and to get the degree done.  I'll never forget what she said: "Quitting and not completing the program reflects poorly on their judgment, and for that reason they want everyone to stay and finish." 

CDJ is well meaning, but her analysis leaves a lot to be desired.  People from great programs have great training and get jobs.  People from less great programs have adequate training and often get jobs, but often they don't.  And for good reasons.  Programs at the bottom of the PGR have poor placement for lots of reasons (the lower you go, the more likely other things will push you out of the profession).  But the kind of correlation CDJ is trying to force really isn't useful in any way.  Ultimately it doesn't take into account candidate factors when trying to correlate with PGR quality rankings.  And that's one thing that no one in this business wants to tell people.  Sometimes it's the candidate and not the program. 

These are interesting points, and, of course, given the small numbers, a couple of people who fall into some of these categories could make a significant difference.  As longtime readers know, I have occasionally linked to other efforts to aggregate placement data that were more sensible than CDJ's, though in one case the underlying data turned out to be sufficiently unsound that I withdrew that link.  I think the model I provided yesterday is a good one to follow for anyone who wants to pursue this.  But I also think it is very important to emphasize that, as with mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future success, and prospective students should scrutinize with care not just the on-line placement data at each program, but also the results for individual faculty.  Unfortunately, there is no substitute for doing this as part of the search process for a graduate program (assuming your goal is academic employment); even rankings of placement that aren't nonsensical are no substitute for doing this.

UPDATE:  [The misrepresentations to which I had responded have been removed, so I am removing the original update.]

And still more on job placement, 2005-2010

Following up on the data from the other day, I've expanded it a bit, and also noted the 2002 PGR rank and the 2011 PGR rank.  Total number of graduates during the period follows the school name.

School	2002 PGR Rank	2011 PGR Rank	% in TT jobs	% in TT jobs at ranked PhD   programs	% in TT jobs at top 20   programs	% in TT jobs at research   universities and SLACs
New York University (23)	1	1	87%	61%	48%	83%
Rutgers University, New Brunswick (36)	1	2	92%	53%	22%	58%
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (31)	4	4	94%	10%	0%	61%
UC Los Angeles (21)	8	11	81%	33%	14%	43%
Yale University (16)	16	7	94%	31%	19%	63%
University of Notre Dame (36)	14	18	75%	6%	0%	28%
University of Chicago (30)	16	20	77%	17%	7%	43%
UC Riverside (23)	32	31	74%	4%	0%	13%
Northwestern University (21)	46	31	76%	5%	0%	62%
Boston University (35)	42	44	63%	3%	0%	20%

I knew from the past (though I had not posted about this) that there would be a very strong correlation between overall PGR rank and placement in ranked programs, research universities, and SLACs (this is true in every academic field, not just philosophy); what surprised me in this little exercise was how much correlation there was between PGR rank and overall tenure-track placement.  Of course, the numbers are small, and if two or three people made different decisions (to accept the tenure-track job rather than the post-doc; not to be the trailing spouse for the other's academic career; etc.) the results would be different; so, too, if I had used a different window.  (Just after this window, one UC Riverside graduate got a permanent post in a ranked PhD program, while another got a tenure-track position in a research oriented MA-granting program.  I treated the ranked terminal MA programs as research university appointments, and I used U.S. News rankings of liberal arts colleges as a rough cut-off for SLACs.)

At the end of the day, bear in mind that even within department, placement success often tracks which faculty you work with.  That's why it pays for students to scrutinize placement records carefully.  Years ago, as longtime readers will know, I "bullied" departments into posting detailed placement records (by threatening to call them out in the PGR if they didn't).  (I put "bullied' in quotes for the obvious reasons:  it's now a meaningless term, but it was hurled about then, and at least it was true that I did threaten a real consequence if departments did not produce information.) 

One other takeaway, that I expect will be confirmed by a more extensive study along these lines:  all else being more or less equal, "brand name" universities still enjoy a slight advantage in job placement.  But more on that once we have more information.

UPDATE:  U.S. Research universities, for purposes here, were AAU universities, universities with PhD programs (ranked or not), and ranked terminal MA programs; outside the US, it gets a bit trickier, but in general any places more or less analagous to these was so counted.

So let's take another look at job placement

I picked three departments which provide good information on-line and which had fairly stable PGR ranks over the last dozen years or so.  One, NYU, I singled out, recently and correctly, for having an excellent placement record; NYU has also been ranked #1 in the PGR for over a decade now.  The second, at my university, has been solidly top 20, though not top 15, during this period.  The third, Boston University, has had a PhD program for a long time and has been in the top 50 of the PGR (but not the top 40) for over a decade as well.  Let's look at graduates from 2005-2010:  this will get out of the mix those who haven't yet been on the academic market, or who have only been on once or twice and so might still be in temporary positions and may yet secure TT positions.  In short, this will give us an idea of how many graduates of these programs are getting tenure-track jobs and what kind of tenure-track jobs.  (In a few cases, the information on-line turned out to be out-of-date, so I updated it for purposes of the below.)

Let's start with NYU.  During this time period we have 23 graduates.  20 of 23 have tenure-track jobs:  87%.  14 have tenure-track jobs at ranked PhD-granting programs (61%).   11 of 23 have tenure-track job at top 20 PhD programs (48%).   19 have tenure-track jobs at research universities (some in fields outside philosophy), and one is at a selective liberal arts college (83%).  Of the three graduates not currently in tenure-track jobs, one went back to medical school (so may yet end up in academia), one took a non-academic job in the region where her spouse (also an NYU philosophy PhD) had a tenure-track job, and one graduate clearly had other events going on in her life, about which she has written.  83% placement at research universities and selective liberal arts colleges is remarkable. 

Now let's look at the University of Chicago, another strong program but not as strong as NYU.  Here we have 30 graduates, of which 23 have tenure-track jobs (77%).  5 of 30 have tenure-track jobs at ranked PhD-granting programs (17%).   2 of 30 have jobs at top 20 PhD programs (7%).  13 of 30 have jobs at research universities or selective liberal arts colleges (43%).  Of the graduates not currently in tenure-track jobs, some have taken jobs outside academia, some are in adjunct positions or post-docs, and some are unaccounted for altogether.

And now Boston University.  During this time period, 2005-2010, we have 35 graduates.  22 secured tenure-track positions (63%).  1 of 35 has a tenure-track job at a ranked PhD program (3%).  None of have tenure-track jobs at top 20 PhD programs.  7 of 35 have tenure-track jobs at research universities or selective liberal arts colleges (20%).  Of the graduates not currently in tenure-track jobs, some are in adjunct or non-tenure-stream positions, and some are unaccounted for altogether.

Here's a table summarizing the findings for graduates 2005-2010 from programs whose PGR rank has been fairly stable over the last dozen years:

School	2011 PGR Rank	% in TT jobs	% in TT jobs at ranked PhD   programs	% in TT jobs at top 20   programs	% in TT jobs at research   universities and SLACs
New York University	1	87%	61%	48%	83%
University of Chicago	20	77%	17%	7%	43%
Boston University	44	63%	3%	0%	20%

This little exercise took about one hour to compile.  I have no doubt that anyone could replicate this data for more departments, if their intention was to provide helpful information to prospective students.  I am sure someone will.

More nonsense rankings

I've corresponded periodically with Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC Merced) about her interest in data on the job market, and I have no doubt her intention is to provide constructive information.  But the road to hell is often paved with good intentions, and an alleged "comparison" like this is confusing and misleading for fairly obvious reasons: 

First, by her own admission, the data is incomplete (indeed, woefully incomplete in some cases I know about).

Second, no one would expect a department's reputation in 2011 to have any correlation with its placement prior to 2011 (unless there had been no changes in the interim), but almost all the placements recorded by Prof. Jennings are from students who would have started graduate school between 2000 and 2005.   I would think philosophers are smart enough to understood that past placement success is a backward-looking measure, and that current faculty reputation, as it correlates with job placement, is a forward-looking measure.

Third, her measure of placement success takes no account of the kinds of jobs graduates secure.  2/2 is the same as 4/4, research university is the same as a liberal arts college, a PhD-granting department is the same as a community college.  I know philosophers happy in all kinds of positions, but it's not information, it's misinformation, to equate them all in purporting to measure job placement.

Fourth, the placement rate is calculated nonsensically:  comparing average placement, as incompletely reported on blogs, between 2011-2014 to average yearly graduates between 2009-2013 is equivalent, in most cases, to comparing two randomly chosen numbers, since many (maybe most) of those placed in 2011-2014 will have completed their degrees well before 2009 and well after 2013.  This is so obvious that I'm mystified why anyone would think this is a relevant comparison.

NYU ranks 26th in placement according to Professor Jennings. Here is NYU's actual placement record.  It really takes some perverse ingenuity to represent a department with one of the best placement records in the world as having a mediocre placement record.  Prof. Jennings really ought to withdraw this nonsense from the web, and wait until she has complete data and can organize it sensibly.

UPDATE:  Rather than withdraw the nonsense ranking, Prof. Jennings digs in her heels.  Alas.  She could share information about job placement without the nonsense ranking/comparison.  (I note that just by adding two tenure-track placements from NYU that had been missed, NYU jumped from #26 to #14, which tells you the worth of this measure.  In addition, of course, some of those treated as unemployed in this measure are JD/PhDs who have not yet gone on the academic market.  Examples like this could be multiplied at all the top departments.)

AND ANOTHER:  Another blog says "everyone in the profession should be appreciative and supportive" of Professor Jennings's work and objects to my criticizing her.  But this blogger and I have a substantive disagreement:  I do not think "everyone in the profession should be appreciative and supportive" since I think what she has produced in this instance (though not only this one, she has done this before) is confusing and highly misleading.  I know many others think this as well, I've heard from them.  These folks don't blog and, understandably, they don't want to get into disputes in the bowels of cyberspace.  That falls to me, alas.   This blogger also implies, falsely, that I am particularly critical of junior philosophers.  I am not.  My criticism of Prof. Jennings is, shall we say, rather more mild than my criticism of Prof. Nagel, among many, many others.  I am an egalitarian:  if people say and do things in public, I respond to what they say and do, not who they are.  If what they say and do suggests poor judgment, dishonesty, carelessness, ulterior motives, etc., I also say so.  (Prof. Jennings took issue with some aspects of the criticism, and as a courtesy to her, I removed one part of it.)

SUR-REPLY:   The author of the other blog (to which I will not link, since he has created a forum for anonymous insults and obnoxious remarks aimed at me) repeats his objection to my criticizing her the way I did; but I criticized her the way I did because the nature of what she did (and its potentially pernicious consequences) warranted that response.  The author can try to redescribe this any way he likes, but the point stands that we disagree about the substance.  If I shared his view of the substance, my criticism would have been different.  The author also denies, implausibly, that he implied that I harshly criticize junior philosophers; indeed on his Facebook page, he described his blog posting as "how the powerful talk to the less powerful."  But any reader of the blog knows this statement is false:  I criticize all fools the same way, and always have, without regard to status.

On the substance, some readers suggest that my real mistake was to assume that Prof. Jennings had "good intentions," and that may be right.  She may simply be trying to discredit the PGR, which would explain why she circulated in public the nonsense ranking/comparison, knowing full well that it was nonsense.  I'm agnostic on whether that is the correct interpretation.

ANOTHER:  From a colleague elsewhere, who aptly sums up the nonsense that has accompanied the nonsense rankings:

I've not seen every twist of the CDJ issues. I saw her latest attempt at an "analysis" of placement issues and quickly saw it was a mess.

I then saw her being promoted as a victim of injustice (or mistreatment of some other kind) followed by her embracing that role.

I continue to be amazed that there is a segment of professional philosophers who think that junior faculty are children and highly vulnerable if criticized in any way...etc. And that these people think that inferences from "here is a good deal of bad work" to "this person is not ‎the sharpest tool in the shed" are problematic. I *hope* this segment is relatively small and appears large only because of distortion caused by frequent blogging and loud claims of victimhood. 

I was treated like a child exactly once as a junior faculty member and on that occasion I firmly but politely told the person treating me that way that I was a 24 year old professional with a phd and not a high school kid.

The whole display is clearly an artifact of the selection effect of those who turn to blogs and blog comments to air their grievances.  Having talked to a number of adults about CDJ, I've yet to see any sympathy for her posture in this matter.