AUSTIN, TEX.
Some guys memorize the batting averages of Major League baseball players. Brian Leiter can recite the publication records of philosophy professors from coast to coast.
Want to know which philosophers offer the best feminist perspectives? Curious about who signed a deal to return to Berkeley and which rising star Yale just lured away from Rice?
Look no further than “The Philosophical Gourmet Report,” an exhaustive ranking of the nation’s graduate programs in analytic philosophy. The author, who holds a joint appointment in law and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, took it upon himself nine years ago to publish a definitive guide for would-be graduate students in philosophy.
The ratings, which have attracted a loyal following among students, have mushroomed into an on-line volume that runs to 50 pages when printed out. It’s filled with academic trivia, detailed program analyses, and the kind of insider gossip that only a true philosophy devotee could dig up. Much of his information comes from a constant flow of e-mail from colleagues who have heard about his report.
This year’s rankings are to be posted on the Internet this week. For the ninth year in a row, Princeton University took top honors in Dr. Leiter’s rankings, followed by New York University and two programs that tied for third: Rutgers University in New Brunswick and the University of Pittsburgh. The top foreign programs, according to Dr. Leiter, are at Oxford University and the University of London.
The report ranks graduate programs in analytic philosophy, and is based mostly on Dr. Leiter’s assessment of the quality of tenured faculty members in each program.
“This is a hobby that’s taken on a life of its own,” he says. “I happen to have a good memory for trivial details, and a taste for academic gossip.”
After graduating from Princeton University with a bachelor’s in philosophy, Dr. Leiter received a law degree from the University of Michigan and later returned there to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy. At Texas, he teaches in the law school, focusing on the philosophy of law. He ranks Texas’s program 20th, and notes that he has tried to avoid favoritism in his ratings.
Sitting in his law-school office, the 34-year-old philosopher/lawyer seems to take a certain delight in delivering withering critiques of philosophers twice his age. He began publishing the rankings at age 26, as a graduate student in philosophy at Michigan, and has been “dissing” philosophers around the country ever since.
“I have to say what I think,” he says. “Too much tact would make the survey pretty useless, wouldn’t it?”
Other rankings of doctoral programs, such as those prepared by the National Research Council, rely on information that is more than a year old. Dr. Leiter prides himself on being up-to-date: “The other reports are a pretty good reflection of what the departments were like a decade ago.”
Because his report is published on the Internet, he can make changes up to the last minute. “I just had an e-mail from M.I.T. saying, ‘Hold the presses. I think an offer is going to be accepted.’ It really was a major appointment that might have affected their rankings.”
Robert Stalnaker, head of the philosophy department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says Dr. Leiter’s report would be more useful if it contained more substance. Last week, M.I.T.'s ranking jumped from 15th to 10th, and the University of Michigan’s dropped from 3rd to 5th when two prominent Michigan scholars accepted job offers at M.I.T.
The report “is like a lot of stuff on the Internet,” Dr. Stalnaker says. “It has to be taken with a grain of salt. Leiter is upfront about the fact that there’s a lot of gossip in the report.”
For all the gossip, many graduate students say that Dr. Leiter’s rankings deliver a healthy dose of useful information to help them choose among programs. The report includes a separate ranking of programs by their strengths in 25 specialties, from decision theory to philosophy of physics. Students are encouraged to look at a program’s overall reputation, and its reputation within a particular specialty.
For students interested in the philosophy of the mind, Rutgers and New York Universities get top marks, while the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is the best program around for legal philosophy, according to the report. Students planning to study Kant should strongly consider Harvard University, Indiana University at Bloomington, or the University of Pennsylvania, he notes.
While his ratings are based largely on the reputations of tenured faculty members, Dr. Leiter also considers the age of the faculty (“since very good but very old faculty do not make an attractive program from the standpoint of prospective students”), the breadth of faculty expertise, and the quality of the junior scholars.
Factoring in a professor’s age irks some professors, like Boston University’s Jaako Hintikka, who accuses Dr. Leiter of “ageism.” In last year’s report, Dr. Leiter mentioned that Dr. Hintikka was the most distinguished senior member of Boston’s philosophy faculty, but added that he “is eligible for retirement.”
The 68-year-old scholar says he made it clear to Dr. Leiter that he has no intention of retiring, and feels that his age has no business being mentioned in the report. As for Dr. Leiter’s contention last year that “many senior spots (at Boston) have been filled by mediocre philosophers,” Dr. Hintikka counters: “I think that’s an extremely subjective judgment.”
While the American Philosophical Association generally discourages students from placing too much weight on surveys, its former director calls Dr. Leiter’s report “a good insider’s guide” to philosophy programs. “It’s somewhat idiosyncratic,” says David A. Hoekema, now an academic dean at Calvin College. “Some areas were very knowledgeable and nuanced, while others were a little sketchy.” As an example of the latter, he points to continental philosophy.
Dr. Leiter’s latest report is to be posted this week on the “Philosophical Resources Center” homepage of Blackwell Publishers (http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/philos/).
‘The Philosophical Gourmet Report’
This on-line report ranks 66 graduate programs in analytic philosophy, based on an assessment of the quality of their tenured professors. The programs are divided into six clusters, each representing programs of similar quality. Here is how the report ranks the top 15 graduate programs. Within the top two groups, several institutions received equal scores.
Group 1
1. Princeton University
2. New York University
3. Rutgers University at New Brunswick
3. University of Pittsburgh
5. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
6. Harvard University
6. University of California at Berkeley
8. University of Arizona
8. University of California at Los Angeles
10. Cornell University
10. Indiana University at Bloomington
10. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
10. University of California at San Diego
10. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
15. Stanford University