Helen Longino (philosophy of science, epistemology, feminist philosophy) at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities has accepted the senior offer from Stanford University, to start in fall 2005. Professor Longino’s career trajectory is an unusual one, since she spent many years at a small, liberal arts college, Mills College, before making the move to a research university, Rice, and then on to Minnesota, and now Stanford. While “writing one’s way up” is common in legal academia, it is less common in philosophy.

UPDATE: Reflecting on the last point, I actually can’t think of a case of a philosopher who spent years at a non-elite liberal arts college who then ended up at one of the very top research universities in the U.S.. Contrast this, again, with law: Jack Balkin (Yale) started at the University of Missouri at Kansas City and George Priest (Yale) started at the University of Puget Sound. If anyone knows of similar cases in philosophy, let me know.

FURTHER UPDATE: Several readers point to Alvin Plantinga, distinguished metaphysician, epistemologist and philosopher of religion at the University of Notre Dame, as another example in philosophy, since he taught for roughly 20 years at Calvin College, before moving to Notre Dame. However, according to this site, Professor Plantinga began his career in the late 1950s (and, it appears, earned tenure by the time he left in 1963) at Wayne State University, a research university in Detroit, which at the time had an exceptionally strong philosophy department (among those on the faculty at various times in the 1950s and 1960s were Richard Cartwright, Edmund Gettier, and Hector-Neri Castenada–as well as, it turns out, Alvin Plantinga!).

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Thanks to all who have written with candidates. The closest seems to be George Sher, the well-known moral and political philosopher who now holds a chair at Rice University, but began his career at Farleigh-Dickinson University, before moving to the University of Vermont, where he spent many years. (Vermont, of course, has had an exceptionally strong philosophy department for more than two decades–it would be one of the top MA programs in the country, for example, if they offered the MA.) Others have mentioned Nicholas Wolterstorff, who spent most of his career at Calvin College, before taking up a post at Yale’s Divinity School. Within Divinity Schools, however, I’ve no idea whether this kind of upward movement is typical or not.

It’s also worth emphasizing that it is very (one might even say, “distressingly”) common for young philosophers who end up at major research universities to have first spent several pre-tenure years at liberal arts colleges and non-research universities. This is both a partial cause and an effect, of course, of the ferocious competitiveness of the job market in philosophy. Recent examples that come to mind include Rachana Kamtekar (now at Arizona, started at Williams), Matthew McGrath (now at Missouri, started at Davidson), Lanier Anderson (recently tenured at Stanford, had temp jobs various places, including Haverford), Bernard Reginster (tenured now at Brown, started at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles), among many others.

FINAL UPDATE: Various readers mention Loren Lomasky (political philosophy), who spent many years at the University of Minnesota, Duluth (so the non-flagship campus of the Minnesota system), before moving to Bowling Green State University, and now to the University of Virginia. Not as dramatic an upward movement as Longino, but still a striking case of “writing one’s way up.”