A national ranking of graduate philosophy programs is under fire, the target of an open letter signed by 175 philosophy professors from across the country.
The letter charges that the annual “Philosophical Gourmet Report” misleads students and harms the profession “by promoting a narrow and inappropriate standard of departmental excellence.”
That critique prompted a scathing, 19-page reply from the report’s author, Brian Leiter, who holds a joint appointment in law and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He has produced the report, which focuses on the quality of tenured faculty members in philosophy departments, since 1989. It is widely read by college students considering graduate study in philosophy, as well as by administrators interested in their departments’ reputations (The Chronicle, September 26, 1997).
Critics, led by a Harvard University philosopher, Richard G. Heck Jr., say the report has taken on too much significance, playing a major role not only in students’ choices of graduate programs, but also in faculty hiring and promotion decisions.
“We have seen more and more students making decisions about where to apply and, later, where to study that strike us as badly mistaken, even bizarre, and which can only be explained as a consequence of their relying upon PGR,” Mr. Heck wrote in remarks posted on his Web site, in a section aimed at “counteracting the excessive influence” of Mr. Leiter’s rankings. “Some of us have now passed from being concerned to being worried.”
He says students often use the report as a measure of overall educational quality, not simply the prestige of a program’s faculty members.
Mr. Leiter calls that worry “condescending” and says students are capable of understanding what the report does and does not measure. Besides, he says, the report itself warns students that it “only measures the philosophical distinction of the faculty, not the quality of their teaching or their commitment to educating young philosophers.”
The report ranks departments as well as specialties like ancient philosophy and the philosophy of physics. Mr. Leiter also writes about scholars’ comings and goings, and offers lengthy commentaries about what students can expect in individual schools and in philosophy studies in general.
He dismisses his critics with the same blunt manner that characterizes the report. “It’s a somewhat depressing spectacle when you have some very able philosophers signing on to a pretty feeble letter for what looks like self-serving reasons,” he says in an interview.
At least some of the criticism of his rankings is motivated by sour grapes, he says. Harvard, with the retirement of several prominent faculty members, has slipped from third to sixth place over the past decade, he notes.
The critics counter that it is unlikely that 175 philosophers, including some of the most noted people in the field, were motivated by hurt feelings. Among the signatories of the letter are Richard Rorty, of Stanford University; Hilary Putnam, of Harvard; Thomas Nagel, of New York University; and Martha C. Nussbaum, of the University of Chicago.
Big Names
The letter argues that while the Leiter rankings measure faculty members’ reputations, even famous philosophers can be lousy teachers. But Mr. Leiter says well-known professors are likelier than others to be able to help their students find good jobs.
“With occasional exceptions, only high-quality philosophers train high-quality philosophers,” he writes in his response, which is posted on his Web page. “And, with almost no exceptions, only philosophers with strong reputations in their areas get students good jobs.”
Professors have weighed in on both sides of the debate, in letters posted on Mr. Heck’s Web sites and on the sites of defenders of the report.
David Velleman, of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, writes that the sections of Mr. Leiter’s report that discuss current recruiting activities “trample the interests” of job applicants by alluding to pending job offers and those that have been declined.
“I am not above enjoying professional gossip, but let’s not pretend that spreading it is a service to the profession,” he writes.
Stewart Shapiro, a professor of philosophy at Ohio State University, writes: “One pernicious consequence of the report is that some of my colleagues seem to take it seriously as a guide to hiring. We took a big hit in the report when a few senior faculty left us. Some of us are anxious to get our higher ranking back. When we consider candidates for a senior appointment, one comment I often hear is, How will this person help us with our rankings?’ ”
But while Mr. Heck’s Web site is flooded with expressions of support, so are the sites of Mr. Leiter’s supporters.
Peter D. Klein, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, writes that the report has given students more than name recognition to go on when they are choosing a graduate school: “A department in a university ... whose halo does not shine as brightly as the one at Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, etc., has a much better chance of being appreciated for what it is; and, what’s more important, job candidates from such departments ... have a greater chance of being interviewed by the good liberal-arts colleges.”
Julia E. Annas, a professor at the University of Arizona, says that before the Leiter rankings began, students had to rely on out-of-date reports that were based “on the opinions of a few people, mostly at East Coast departments in famous universities, whose rankings reflected a limited perspective and inadequate knowledge of the philosophical world in the country as a whole.”
Mr. Leiter’s reports, she says, have made departments “more scrupulous and open.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Page: A10
