Our aims in creating this blog include the following:
- To encourage healthy and spirited debate about the usefulness of the PGR to the profession;
- To debate the influence of the PGR on (a) attracting prospective graduate students to programs and (b) hiring decisions at both the junior and senior faculty levels;
- To debate the value of the PGR as a guide to faculty quality in philosophy;
- To debate the value of the PGR as a guide to graduate program quality in philosophy;
- To make available in a single resource various views on the PGR for those considering an academic career in philosophy;
- To air in a public forum suggestions on improving the PGR.
We should state from the get-go what will not be accepted on this blog. Insults, ad hominem attacks, or remarks of a generally vicious nature will be removed. Good arguments will be applauded. Bad arguments will be tolerated, but will be met with merciless criticism. Appropriate blog-etiquette should be displayed at all times.
The PGR has achieved a long-standing status in the profession and across the globe as a prominent guide to faculty and graduate program quality in philosophy. We are of a view that the report is here to stay, but that this shouldn't preclude healthy discussion on its merits, methods and limitations. Since its origins, the PGR has been controversial in the profession, provoking strong views in both dissenters and supporters. We expect this to continue with the publication of the latest issue of the report, but we hope that this blog serves to convey these views in a respectful and open-minded way.
Approximately every month or twice a month, we'll create a post looking to stimulate debate among graduate students and professors in philosophy on the benefits and drawbacks of the PGR to our profession. For now, we've decided to allow anonymous postings to encourage frank and straightforward discussion, but we expect those who have less at stake in making their views known to be open about their identities. (If you do choose to remain anonymous, please come up with a catchy moniker so we can keep track of who you are.) In cases where issues or concerns are raised that deserve further discussion, we'll give them posts of their own.
If you would like to communicate directly with the administrators of this blog, you can send an e-mail to pgrcritique@gmail.com.
For examples of the sort of debate we expect on this blog, we direct your attention to the following links, which provide a summary of the controversy surrounding the PGR:
- In 2003, Richard Heck created a site while at Harvard University listing several criticisms of the PGR. That site can be found here. Included is an open letter signed by just under 300 members of the profession expressing concern about the influence of the PGR at the time.
- The letter prompted a vigorous defense of the PGR by a number of philosophers, principally Keith DeRose at Yale University here, where you'll find a number of letters in support of the report.
- Brian Leiter at the University of Texas at Austin and current editor of the PGR subsequently provided an open letter of his own here in reply to Heck and others.
- Heck has remarked on the debate here, with a comment on Leiter's reply here. Currently at Brown University, he has updated and expanded on his criticisms of the PGR here.
We'll inaugurate this blog with a challenge that DeRose raises. Speaking of those who criticize the PGR, he writes:
"We should eventually judge them by how they put the concern for prospective graduate students that they express in their letter into helpful positive action, but we should give them time and even those of us who strongly disagree with them over the value of the PGR should wish them well in their positive efforts. [. . .] Let's see what they come up with."
So here's the challenge: if not the PGR, then what?
17 comments:
Ok, let's get this party started. For the benefit of partial disclosure, I'm at a school ranked in the twentyish range of the PGR. The fact of the matter is that the PGR isn't going away and this is a good thing. I checked out the DeRose site - it's been three years since he issued that challenge and I've yet to see anything put forward that provides the services that hte report does.
During that time the PGR's taken criticisms into account and improved its survey methods (wider sampling, area rankings, normalized scoring, handicaps for faculty size, etc.) It's already the preeminent resource for those looking to assess the quality of a program and attend grad school, and the full report includes alot of other helpful advice besides. Leiter counsels against its use as the sole resource in choosing a program, but given the lack of options it's the best place to start.
There's every reason to expect further improvements to the PGR as the report becomes more accepted for what it does across the profession. Until they can come up with something better, PGR critics should put up or shut up.
oh...and call me 'Charlie'.
Charlie: could you expand on the services you take the PGR to provide? Is it a service for judging faculty quality or the quality of a grad program? Or both?
Thanks for providing all these links. I was wondering what happened to the Heck website. If there are really 300 signatories to Heck's "letter of concern" (sorry, can't be bothered to count) I find it puzzling that one of Leiter's frequently trumpeted ripostes to this letter is that it reflects the views of a tiny minority of professional philosophers.
The overall rankings in this year's edition of the PGR were completed by 270 philosophers. Going by Leiter's estimate that there are over 10,000 professional philosophers in the English-speaking world, we're left with a situation in which less than 2.7% of those in the profession are evaluating the rest. Shouldn't the results of the PGR be rejected by Leiter's own criteria?
In response to Linus:
You ask: "Shouldn't the results of the PGR be rejected by Leiter's own criteria?"
And you apparently think that the criteria is counting the number of people who did evaluations for the report and comparing this number with the number of people who signed the Heck letter.
This is an apples to oranges comparison.
1. The Heck letter was open to any philosopher who wanted to sign.
2. Evaluators for the Leiter Report are chosen by the Advisory Board which is asked to nominate people with special knowledge of the subspecialties discussed in the report.
One might of course try to argue that the Advisory Board in some way does a bad job of nominating evaluators or that the Advisory Board isn't well qualified to do this job. The names of the Advisory Board members and those who filled out surveys are listed in the report.
But the fact that more people signed an open letter than filled out evaluations for the report is presumably not relevant to making such an argument.
In response to anonymous #1:
My point had to do with Leiter's reasons for dismissing the Heck letter. One of those reasons concerned the number of signatories to the letter: they number less than 3% of professional philosophers in the English-speaking world and "[do] not reflect a majority view (nor, as far as we can tell, even a significant minority view) of the professional philosophical community in the US." (This is Blackwell's response to the letter quoted by Leiter.)
My question is: shouldn't these same reasons hold for those who dismiss the PGR? If the relative dearth of signatories to the Heck letter suggests we shouldn't give any credence to it, can people be blamed for adopting the same attitude to the PGR, which has roughly the same percentage of philosophers passing judgment on the rest?
I take it that the apples to oranges comparison you mention consists in comparing those who chose to sign their names to the Heck letter (the signatories) and those who were chosen by the PGR's Advisory Board (the evaluators).
I presume the point here is that those who choose to sign on to a letter will (probably) have vested interests in doing so, while those who are chosen or requested to evaluate other departments have little to gain personally or professionally from doing so. So the judgments of the latter are more reliable than those of the former. But is this right? It seems to me that all that separates these two cases are the degrees of self-selection.
The difference is the 300 philosophers were all of those who took their opportunity to sign a letter expressing their disapproval of the report.
The 270 philosophers who participated in the survey were chosen not to voice approval of the report, but to provide data concerning reputation which would be aggregate via normal statistical techniques. That there are only 270 matters only if you had some reason to believe that they are unrepresentative.
Any discussion of the representativeness of the evaluators has to reference Kieran Healy's nice treatment of that question.
Justin: thanks for the link to the Healy paper and thread. Very interesting stuff. I guess this is the sticking point then: are the 270 evaluators who participated in the ratings representative of the (by Leiter's estimate) 10,000 professional philosophers in the English-speaking world?
This issue comes up a couple of times in the comments thread and Healy himself states it would be better to have a larger sample of raters to work with. (He's working with the 2004 report, which had 266 evaluators, just four less than those participating in the overall rankings of the current report.)
I find a problematic part of the methodology here the wide discrepancy in the number of evaluators per department. Some departments have just one evaluator - with the aggregate score reflecting that individual's judgment - others have ten or more. Wouldn't the representativeness of the sample be increased if each department on the report had a set quota of evaluators?
Just for the record, let's note that nobody has answered the original challenge: if not the PGR, then what?
As to what the PGR provides, I think it does a reasonable job of measuring the scholarly reputation of the faculty at Ph.D. programs in the English-speaking world, mainly among philosophy professors at other Ph.D.-granting instituitions. It isn't the only factor grad school applicants should consider--and nobody thinks that it is--but knowing the reputational standings of departments is valuable information.
"There's every reason to expect further improvements to the PGR as the report becomes more accepted for what it does across the profession. Until they can come up with something better, PGR critics should put up or shut up."
Better than what? What is the PGR good for? Must be individual vocational placement in the moving demographic of the profession. So it is an index for the self-interested to increase the probability that their interests will be served. And it is objectively good in that limited sense of self-service. Such stats may be Twainian projections beyond "damn lies", but they also drive pragmatic strategies based on demographics. But do these stats serve philosophy in a sense that as a colleague of mine says transcends pragmatics? Are we better as a profession for such self-promotion?
Did the stats of disapproval serve Socrates personally? Nope. How did they serve philosophy as reflected in his condemnation by the Athenian majority?
By being wrong.
Michael Pakaluk answers the challenge here.
"my name is nobody",
What exactly would it be for something to serve philosophy in the sense of "transcending pragmatics"? If the PGR actually is good for "individual vocational placement in the moving demographic of the profession", I would consider this a point in favor of having the PGR.
Pakaluk's answer to the challenge in his posting's comments, as far as I can tell, seems to be "students can all of the information they need from well-informed professors at their undergraduate institutions."
The testimony of people who applied to grad school prior to the PGR (see DeRose's post linked to above, for instance) indicates that this system didn't always work so well.
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