The critics of the Philosophical Gourmet Report have largely packed up and gone home (even Harvard, to its credit, has removed the link to Richard Heck’s attack on the PGR from December 2001).  A recent note from a student nicely captures how I’ve always felt about these attacks:

As someone who is applying to graduate school this fall, let me first say thank you for the PGR and for the updates on faculty hiring on your blog.  It’s incredible to me that anyone could criticize PGR.  Of course it’s not some perfect measurement of the absolute quality of each individual program.  But without it, people like me would be in the dark about the relative strengths of the various schools.

It really has never been any more complicated than that.