Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Is there any other field where everyone knows the top two departments are at non-"brand name" universities

Thanks to the PGR, everyone knows that NYU and Rutgers are the top two departments in American philosophy.    In most other disciplines, the "top two or three" departments are always some mix of Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Caltech, Chicago, Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, Yale, sometimes also Michigan, Penn or UCLA.  NYU and Rutgers dominate no other fields the way they dominate philosophy.  This is one of many things that make complaints about "prestige bias" in philosophy so odd:  the prestige in the PGR era actually tracks the quality of the faculties, not the reputation of the university as a whole.  This is particularly striking in the humanities, where being a "brand name" university seems to be decisive in most other fields for preeminence.   (In the natural sciences, it seems easier for non-"brand name" schools to be recognized as excellent, perhaps because the criteria for important contributions are clearer and less pedigree-sensitive.)

All objections to the PGR and the work I do on this blog are principled and objective, and never self-serving (never!)

For example, here is philosopher Helen De Cruz on Twitter, making a principled objection based on racial and gender bias to my noting last year that Saint Louis University's loss of John Greco to Georgetown "may" lead to the department dropping out of the top 50, notwithstanding having hired De Cruz:

Clearly the only possible explanation for my prediction was that Greco is a white man, and De Cruz is not.  The fact that Greco is much more senior than De Cruz, and that his work has had much more impact than that by De Cruz (in part, at least, because he's much more senior) had nothing, of course, to do with the prediction--which, as it happened, came true.  Go figure!

U.S. Universities by membership in the National Academy of Sciences (through 2021)

We last did this in 2018 (although Rockefeller University was incorrectly omitted last time).  The National Academy of Sciences is the even more selective "science only" cousin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. While it does elect faculty in the social sciences, its focus is on the natural sciences, engineering and other applied sciences, and the biological sciences, including those in and around medicine; any university with a good medical school tends to do better, all else being equal, in NAS representation (indeed, some universities with top medical schools, like UC San Francisco and Texas Southwestern in Dallas make the list, despite not being full service research universities). As a result I mark with an asterisk (*) universities without medical schools, and I mark with a # universities with medical schools with very high research profiles (Some schools, like UT Austin, UC Riverside and Illinois/Urbana have only recently added medical schools.) As with the AAAS, there is a certain amount of "the rich get richer" at the NAS, though the schools with the most members are indeed very strong in the sciences.

1.  #Harvard University (188)

2.  #Stanford University (164)

3.  *University of California, Berkeley (125)

4.  *Massachusetts Institute of Technology (120)

5.  *Princeton University (89)

6.  *California Institute of Technology (70)

7.  #Columbia University (69)

8.  Yale University (67)

9.  University of California, San Diego (53)

10. University of Chicago (48)

11. #University of California, San Francisco (46)

11. #University of Washington, Seattle (46)

13. New York University (45)

14. #University of California, Los Angeles (43)

15. #University of Pennsylvania (40)

16. Cornell University (34)

16. *Rockefeller University (34)

16. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (34)

19. University of Wisconsin, Madison (33)

20. #Johns Hopkins University (32)

Philosophy PhD admissions decisions are starting to come out in significant numbers

Here.  Good luck to all readers who are applying this round!

Why are all Philosophical Gourmet Report updates here on this blog?

I confess I shouldn't be surprised any longer by what the PGR/Leiter haters pretend to be concerned about, but this one really does amaze me.  So let me spell it out for the benefit of those who genuinely don't understand.  Since many readers are not interested in the philosophy rankings, I put all this below the fold.

Good undergraduate experiences in philosophy?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--MORE COMMENTS WELCOME

A philosopher elsewhere writes:

I'm curious about whether your blog's readers have a sense of which American colleges and universities offer the best philosophy education for undergraduates (not necessarily undergraduates intending to make a career of philosophy). I'd be interested even in anecdotal evidence, such as personally good (or bad) experiences that people have had studying philosophy as undergrads. 

I'm asking because I have a daughter who is approaching college age, and other things being equal (an important caveat) I'd like her to go somewhere that has a good philosophy program for undergraduates.

The PGR has long had a section on undergraduate study (the section for the 2021 PGR is being updated), but I take it what is sought here are reports from current or former undergraduates or from parents whose kids had good experiences at particular schools.  Please include a valid email address, and for negative comments, a name is preferred in addition to the email address (which will not appear).

The study of philosophy in law schools, and JD/PhD programs in the U.S. (and elsewhere), 2021 edition

ORIGINALLY POSTED OCTOBER 4, 2021

This follows up on a 2017 post on this topic, which takes as its starting point the 2017 PGR section on the study of philosophy in law schools.

Some terminology:  by "general jurisprudence," I mean the core philosophical questions about the nature of law, the relationship between law and morality, and the nature of legal reasoning; by "normative jurisprudence," I mean the myriad philosophical attempts to make normative sense (or provide normative rationalizations) of different substantive areas of law, like torts, contracts, criminal law, property, anti-discrimination law, free speech, and so on.

1.  The main reason to consider a JD/PhD program at the same university is that it almost always involves saving time on your coursework--that is one of their main advantages, along with a better chance of continuity of supervision and interaction with faculty mentors.

2.  Many students, however, do the law degree at one place, and the PhD somewhere else.  This can make good sense, depending on a student's interests and the strengths of differing schools.  (In the law school here at Chicago, we have had terrific students with PhDs (or DPhils) from Oxford, Princeton, NYU, Brown, Michigan, and CUNY, among other places; in addition, outstanding law graduates from here are now pursuing PhDs in philosophy at Princeton, Pittsburgh, and Cornell, among other places.)  (As an aside, a student with a common-law law degree and a suitable background in philosophy can do a 2-3 year JSD here in the law school at Chicago focusing on general jurisprudence.)

3.  Legal academia is more pedigree-sensitive than academic philosophy (and I'm sure many of you think academic philosophy is way too pedigree-sensitive!).  Four law schools dominate the market for new law teachers:  Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.  (With the exception of Stanford, these are also three of the top four faculties in scholarly influence, as well as the four schools that graduate the most Supreme Court clerks.)  On a per capita basis, Yale is ahead of the other three in placement in law teaching (primarily a selection effect), and these four are ahead of everyone else (see, e.g., this from 2011 and this from 2007, although not much has changed in the interim).  On a placement success rate basis (i.e., percentage of academic job seekers who actually get tenure-track jobs), Chicago and Yale generally dominate.  Stanford Law has no serious interest in legal philosophy.  Harvard Law has recently added some junior faculty in normative jurisprudence (in addition to senior faculty with philosophical interests--like Richard Fallon [constitutional theory], John Goldberg [tort theory], and Henry Smith [property theory]), so it is a better choice than previously (it remains irrelevant for general jurisprudence, however).  

Smarmy Jonathan Ichikawa still dissembling

Somehow Ichikawa (part of the miscreant team from Vancouver) thinks that the unfortunate disagreement (and, in part, misunderstanding) between the PGR editors, Professors Brogaard and Pynes, and Wiley-Blackwell, shows that I'm not honest (!).  (A reader sent me his tweet [we are mutually blocked on Twitter] stating, "Brian Leiter is not an honest person, and the PGR is intellectually bankrupt.")  Since I literally have nothing do with any of this (I appointed Brogaard as a co-editor in 2014, and then Pynes as another co-editor for 2017, at which point they were in charge, and I have only offered them advice about the PGR when asked, and that's it), this really is a stretch even by Ichihkawa's standards of dishonesty, which are, to be sure, peerless.  (Recall that when Ichikawa and Carrie Jenkins were challenged over their defamation of me, their own lawyer would not defend their statements as true [see #5], arguing only that they were "lawful.")

There are two other ironies here, beyond the "pot calling the kettle black."

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.

Update on the 2021 PGR from Professor Pynes

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 27^th 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.

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. 

All the ranking data for the 2021-22 Philosophical Gourmet Report...

...is now available at the Wiley-Blackwell site.   Some of the other pages are still being updated, but all the ranking data is there.

PGR Update

Professor Pynes tells me all the main ranking data should be online before the week is out.  I'll post a link when it is available.

PGR 2021 Preview: Summary of specialty rankings for programs tied at 19th (CORRECTED)

Continuing with the recent specialty rankings previews for programs outside the very top ranks, below the fold are the summaries of the specialty rankings for the three programs tied at 19th:  Cornell University; University of California at San Diego; University of Chicago.

PGR 2021 Preview: Summary of specialty rankings for programs ranked 22-24

Continuing with the recent specialty rankings previews for programs outside the very top ranks, below the fold are the summaries of the specialty rankings for the programs ranked 22 to 24:  University of Arizona and University of Wisconsin at Madison (tied at 22nd), and University of California, Irvine (24th).

PGR 2021 Preview: Summary of specialty rankings for programs tied at 25th

Continuing with the recent specialty rankings previews for programs outside the very top ranks, below the fold are the summaries of the specialty rankings for the programs tied at 25th:  Ohio State University and Washington University, St. Louis.

PGR 2021 Preview: Summary of specialty rankings for programs tied 27th

Continuing with the recent specialty rankings previews for programs outside the very top ranks, below the fold are the summaries of the specialty rankings for the programs tied at 27th:   University of California at Riverside; University of Colorado at Boulder; University of Massachusetts at Amherst; and University of Pennsylvania.

PGR 2021 Preview: Summary of specialty rankings for programs tied 31st

Continung with the recent specialty rankings previews for programs outside the very top ranks, below the fold are the summaries of the specialty rankings for the programs tied at 31st:   Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins University.

PGR 2021 Preview: Summary of specialty rankings for programs tied 38th

Continung with the recent specialty rankings previews for programs outside the very top ranks, below the are the summaries of the specialty rankings for the programs tied at 38th:  Northwestern University and University of Maryland, College Park.

PGR 2021 Preview: Summary of specialty rankings for programs tied at 46th

Continuing with the recent preview, below the fold are the summaries of specialty rankings for the five schools tied at 46th:   University of California at Davis; University of Illinois at Chicago; University of Minnesota at Minneapolis-St. Paul; University of Rochester; and University of Utah.

PGR 2021 Preview: Summary of specialty rankings for U.S. programs ranked 44th

Following up on yesterday's preview, below the fold are the summaries of specialty rankings for the two programs tied for 44th in the U.S.:  Florida State University and Rice University.  The remainder of the top fifty should follow later today.

PGR 2021 Preview: Summary of specialty rankings for U.S. programs ranked 40th

Lower-ranked (overall) programs often have strength in particular specialties, which it is useful for prospective students to know about.   Today, I list the specialty rankings for the programs ranked 40 overall:  Boston University, Carnegie-Mellon University, Syracuse University, and University of California at Santa Barbara.  I'll fill out the rest of the top 50 over the next couple of days, unless of course the full report goes live before then.  

Remember that the rankings in the specialties include ALL Anglophone programs, not just the U.S.

PGR 2021 update

Professor Pynes has delivered all the key files to Wiley-Blackwell, and gone to great lengths to present it in a format that should make preparing it for release on the Internet fairly simple.  He tells me that W-B has been working on getting it live, but has not confirmed a release date.  I hope by early next week!

PGR 2021 Preview: Anglophone programs by "mode"

Following up on programs by "median" score, below the fold are the modes of 3.5 or higher for the top Anglophone programs:

PGR 2021 Preview: what the summary of specialty rankings by department will look like

Below the fold, I give two examples, for Cornell (#19 overall, in a tie)) and for MIT (#7 overall, in a tie).   This should be particularly useful for students figuring out where to apply given their interests.

PGR 2021 Preview: Anglophone programs by "median" score

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SATURDAY, FOR THOSE WHO MAY HAVE MISSED IT

Below the fold are the Anglophone programs with a median score of 3.0 or higher:

PGR 2021 Preview: U.S. programs ranked 17-30 in the overall rankings

The full PGR should be online if not by the end of next week, then just before Xmas.  I'll post a couple of more previews before then.   Previously, I noted the "top 15" (really 16) U.S. programs in the overall rankings. Below the fold are the programs ranked 17 through 30, with their mean score in the right-hand column:

PGR 2021 Preview: Programs with the most "Group 2" rankings in the specialty rankings

Following up on the listing of programs with the most "Group 1" programs, below the fold are those programs with four or more specialty areas ranked in "Group 2":

PGR 2021 Preview: Programs with the most "Group 1" rankings in the specialties (CORRECTED)

Below the fold are the programs ranked among the top programs ("Group 1") in two or more specialty areas of philosophy:

PGR 2021 Preview: Most Improved U.S. Departments, 2006-2021

Here, below the fold, are the U.S. programs that have moved up at least ten spots since the 2006 PGR:

Which areas have a "Group 1" consisting of programs with a rounded mean of 5.0? (CORRECTED)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY:  UPDATED

Most do not:  generally, the "Group 1" programs have a rounded mean of 4.5, meaning of course that there is some disagreement about what makes for excellence in the specialty.  But eight specialties have a "Group 1" consisting of programs (mostly only one program) with a rounded mean of 5.0, meaning specialists in those areas share more of a consensus.  Those areas and the programs with a rounded mean of 5.0 are below the fold: 

PGR 2021 Preview: Top 10 Programs in General Philosophy of Science

Continuing with the specialty previews, below the fold are the top 10 programs in philosophy of science (with median and mode scores in parentheses after each school's name):

The BPhil in philosophy at Oxford

MOVING TO FRONT FROM THIS MORNING--UPDATED

This is a pretty unappealing portrait by a recent BPhil student; from his summation:

In sum, partly due to systematic funding cuts facing UK Higher Education institutions in the last few years, there are several reasons why the Oxford BPhil can be a bad choice for students (but which are not very widely known).

These not so good things are:

• -          Expensive fees
• -          Almost zero funding options
• -          Overpopulated classes
• -          Relatively little supervision
• -          Lots of deadlines and independent work
• -          Very little distinctive advantage for PhD applications

I'm opening comments for reactions or corrections to the description of the BPhil in the preceding.

UPDATE:  See the helpful response in the comments from Professor Timpson, Chair of the Philosophy Faculty Board at Oxford.

PGR 2021 Preview: Biggest Moves (Up and Down) in the Overall Rankings in the UK

In the overall rankings for the UK, the programs below the fold were the biggest movers (at least 3 positions), either up or down:

2021 PGR Preview: Biggest Declines in the Overall Rankings for the U.S. Top 50

We noted the big increases (5 or more spots) in the U.S. top 50 a couple of weeks back; below the fold are the schools that dropped 5 or more spots in the 2021 PGR compared to 2017:

PGR specialties where there were not enough evaluators to rank programs based on rounded means

This year, those areas were:   American pragmatism, feminist philosophy, philosophy of art, philosophy of race, philosophy of social science.  Each had five or fewer evaluators.  (In each case, the problem was the yield on invited evaluators in terms of participants.)  Programs in these fields were broken into two groups (based on the scores submitted):  Highly Recommended, and Recommended.  So, for example, in feminist philosophy, the "highly recommended" schools for 2021 are:  Cambridge University, City University of New York Graduate Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

PGR 2021 Preview: Top 4 in Medieval Philosophy

Continuing with the specialty previews, below the fold are the top 4 programs in medieval philosophy (with median and mode scores in parentheses after each school's name):

2021 PGR Preview: Top 5 Programs in Early Modern Philosophy: 18th Century

Continuing with the specialty previews, below the fold are the top 5 programs in early modern  philosophy:  18th Century (with median and mode scores in parentheses after each school's name):

PGR 2021 Preview: Top 3 Programs in Applied Ethics

Continuing with the specialty previews, below the fold are the top 3 programs in applied ethics (with median and mode scores in parentheses after each school's name):

PGR 2021 Preview: Top 6 Programs in Mathematical Logic

Continuing with the specialty previews, below the fold are the top 6 programs in mathematical logic (with median and mode scores in parentheses after each school's name):

PGR 2021 Preview: Top 11 in Metaethics & Moral Psychology

Continuing with the specialty previews, below the fold are the top 11 programs in metaethics and moral psychology (with median and mode scores in parentheses after each school's name):

PGR 2021 Preview: Top 9 Programs in Decision, Rational Choice, & Game Theory

Continuing with the specialty previews, below the fold are the top 9 programs in decision, rational choice, and game theory (with median and mode scores in parentheses after each school's name):

PGR 2021 Preview: Top 5 Programs in 20th-Century Continental Philosophy

Continuing with the specialty previews, below the fold are the top 5 programs in 20th-century Continental philosophy (with median and mode scores in parentheses after each school's name):

PGR 2021 Preview: Top 5 Programs in Philosophy of Biology

MOVING TO FRONT--ROUNDED MEAN SCORES WERE OMITTED ORIGINALLY

Continuing with the specialty previews, below the fold are the top 5 programs in philosophy of biology (with median and mode scores in parentheses after each school's name):

PGR 2021 Preview: Top 10 Programs in Normative Ethics

Continuing with the specialty previews, below the fold are the top 10 programs in normative ethics (with median and mode scores in parentheses after each school's name):

PGR 2021 Preview: Top 4 Programs in Philosophy of Religion

Continuing with the specialty previews, below the fold are the top 4 programs in philosophy of religion (with median and mode scores in parentheses after each school's name):

PGR 2021 Preview: Top 7 Programs in Philosophy of Cognitive Science

Continuing with the specialty previews, below the fold are the top 7 programs in philosophy of cognitive science (with median and mode scores in parentheses after each school's name):

PGR 2021 Preview: Top 8 Programs in Metaphysics

Continuing with the specialty previews, below the fold are the top 8 programs in metaphysics (with median and mode scores in parentheses after each school's name):

PGR 2021 Preview: Top 14 Programs in Philosophy of Law

Continuing with the specialty previews, below the fold are the top 14 programs in philosophy of law (with median and mode scores in parentheses after each school's name):

PGR 2021 Preview: Top 11 Programs in Philosophical Logic

Continuing with the specialty previews, below the fold are the top 11 programs in philosophical logic (with median and mode scores in parentheses after each school's name):