There are some downsides to being, as PGR Advisory Board member Alex Byrne (MIT) put it some years ago, "the most powerful person in philosophy"–including the fact that I’m not, yet bear the costs (as Byrne’s joke brings out) of sometimes being perceived as such.  Anyone who peruses Cyberspace knows some of the costs:  personal attacks, resentment, becoming the object of people’s desire to kill the messenger, and so on.  When I first produced a simple version of the PGR for the benefit of Michigan undergrads in 1989, I did not anticipate that it would become an institution unto itself a decade later.  I have never had any doubt about the value of the PGR to students, which is why I carry on, notwithstanding periodic unpleasantness.  A kind undergraduate philosophy major (at a school with a top 50 PhD program) sent me this nice note the other day; since the PGR is very much a collective effort, I wanted to share these sentiments, which are representative of what I hear with frequency from students:

I want to say thanks for all you do to improve the community of currently active academic philosophers. I am in the midst of a final paper and, in citing Nicholas Jolley’s introduction to Leibniz, discovered you are the series editor. As a senior currently applying to philosophy graduate schools, I have spent countless hours on the Gourmet report and on the Leiter Reports blog, searching for those perfect-fit institutions to which to send my applications. In both these projects, I really don’t know where I would be without access to the fruits of your labor.

My budding life as a philosopher has already been greatly impacted by your efforts in the philosophical community, and I just wanted you to know I appreciate it.

Thanks to everyone who contributes to the PGR and makes it a now far more useful tool than it was in the beginning.