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PGR Update

Brian Leiter

Most of the 2009 PGR has been delivered to Blackwell.  I may continue to post a few excerpts of the results over the next few weeks, until it all appears on-line at the current URL.  My sincere thanks to the 300+ philosophers who participated in the surveys and provided their expert input.

I am thinking that, with the financial crisis, it may may make sense to delay the next PGR till 2012 or 2013, since the pace of faculty movement is likely to slow considerably.  Thoughts from readers and those who use the Report?  Signed comments only.  Thanks.

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13 responses to “PGR Update”

  1. Zachary Ernst

    Personally, I think that the PGR is too important a service to the profession to be delayed, even in the current financial climate. I, for one, am not capable of forming my own opinions without the aid of a self-selected sample of opinions from people who are directly affected by the outcome of the survey.

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  2. Skef Iterum

    My impression from your posts concerning this revision of the report is that it took no more than a few months of preparation. If that's roughly accurate, it doesn't seem like there is any need to worry about the year of the next report at this time. You can just evaluate whether there have been changes sufficient to warrant a new version when you would have started preparing the next one under normal circumstances.

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  3. Alastair Norcross

    I agree with Skef Iterum. We don't yet know how the bad economy will affect faculty movement. Some places may be much worse affected than others, and may be forced to make the kind of cuts that will drive some faculty away. Florida may just be the first of many (or at least of a few). Perhaps some places that have managed their endowments well will be able to poach good people from hard-hit places.

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  4. Fritz Warfield

    I'll add to the above the following: even if lateral hiring is slowed by the economy, retirements that have a significant impact may or may not be slowed. We can likely make a decision in the summer of 2011 about whether to do a 2011 report.

    My thought then is to agree with you Brian: it *may* make sense to wait until 2012 or 2013. It may not.

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  5. Brian Leiter

    I was originally reluctant to approve the sarcastic comment by Professor Ernst, above, lest it derail the purpose of the thread. As I wrote to him earlier today: "I am happy to receive your critical comments on the PGR, but on this thread I wanted to find out whether those who beneift from the Report (I gather you are not one) have a view about" the question posed. But now that I've gotten some helpful and sensible replies, I would like to 'clear the air' as it were, by responding to Professor Ernst's misnunderstandings which may, or may not, be shared by others.

    The point of the PGR is not to help Professor Ernst form his own opinion about faculty quality at different PhD programs (though I have heard that at least some philosophers do take note of the aggregated opinion of their peers in their specialty in forming their own opinions–but obviously some philosophers may not be interested in what their professional peers think). The point is to help students identify reputable PhD programs to which they ought to apply given their interests, programs which might, then, help them achieve successful professional careers in academic philosophy, assuming that is what they want.

    Only one of the evaluators who participated in the PGR surveys is self-selected: namely, me. Members of the Advisory Board were largely (not entirely) selected by me, though as is obvious, I have little in common, philosophically or othewrise, with even those I did invite. The rest of the evaluators (the vast majority) were selected by members of the Advisory Board, so they too were not self-selected. The diversity and quality of the pool of evaluators is apparent to anyone who is not self-deceived or has some other axe to grind.

    We could perhaps survey accountants or bus drivers about the quality of philosophy faculties in order to avoid surveying individuals who might be affected by the "outcome" of the surveys, but this would rather defeat the survey's main purpose, noted above. The survey data is reviewed for evidence of strategic voting (e.g., outlier scores for particular faculties are chekced to see whether they are consistent with an evaluator's other scores). In numerous iterations of these surveys, over many years, we have only once found an instance of strategic voting in the "overall" surveys, and never found any instance of it in the specialty rankings.

    I would welcome further comments on the original subject of this posting.

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  6. jon kvanvig

    Brian, I think you are right to suspect that faculty changes will be minimal. There will still be some, as Fritz notes, but I suspect students will not be harmed by missing out on a new survey, unless the significance of retirements, for example, is not brought to their attention. The question then becomes one of how much effort it is for you to do the survey–after all, it is an act of supererogation on your part to do it. If the efforts are relatively minimal, I'd like to see it done again; if it costs you several weeks of research time, everyone ought to understand if it is postponed. If postponed, though, I assume you'd still do your usual updates about who has moved and who has retired, and if that is available at the PGR site, it can minimize ill effects for students.

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  7. Tim O'Keefe

    One change that will occur, regardless of how the economic climate effects lateral moves, is that some promising young scholars will deliver on their promise and bloom into nationally recognized and respected experts. It *is* possible for schools slowly to improve their reputation by discovering and then nurturing talented people at the beginnings of their careers, rather than hiring big names that make an immediate splash.

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  8. Brian Leiter

    Certainly what Tim says is right, though whether waiting two years or three will make a difference in registering the rising profiles of younger philosophers is less clear. One might think waiting longer is a better way to, in fact, "reward" these kinds of accomplishments.

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  9. Ram Neta

    Given current economic conditions, I think it is reasonable for most graduate programs to expect that, for the next two years at least, a larger than normal number of recent college graduates will be interested in applying to graduate school. And these people are likely to want the best and most up-to-date information that they can get about where to apply. Those applying to philosophy graduate school are likely to want an up-to-date version of the PGR (unless they have access to some other source of information). So, if PGR's aim is to provide those who are interested in applying to philosophy graduate school with good information about where to apply, I expect that the next couple of years will afford an opportunity to serve that aim for an even larger audience than has been normal in recent years.

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  10. Mohan Matthen

    The two-year cycle wouldn't be invalidated by less movement. Faculty composition is not the only factor in the quality of graduate programs, and faculty movement is not the only factor in change. Thus: People publish and gain (or occasionally lose) credibility. Groups gel and begin to be known as groups. Areas of research get to be perceived as more or less central/peripheral. (Think of how the reputation of experimental philosophy and of empirically based philosophy has changed over the last few years; think of how metaphysics has peaked as an indicator of quality.) Graduate students get placed and propagate the influence of their doctoral program. People get asterisks next to their names as they achieve the septuagenarian state. For these and other reasons — not least of all that my opinions ARE influenced by those of others — I'd encourage you to stick to a two-year cycle.

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  11. Justin Klocksiem

    I don't see how any important purpose would be served by waiting an additional year to do a new batch of surveys. Students who apply to graduate school are likely to benefit from up-to-date information, regardless of the economic climate. That is, to the extent that the PGR provides helpful information, the helpfulness is not enhanced by its being an extra year out-of-date.

    Perhaps you, Brian, do not want to do another version of the report until 2012 or 2013, which is, of course, your prerogative. But in that case, perhaps it would make more sense to delegate more of your editorial duties to the advisory board, or to promote someone to a powerful assistant editor position, or to turn over editing duties to someone else altogether, and then run the surveys on schedule. Or not–it's your call.

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  12. Jon Cogburn

    One very important reason to not put off the new version is that people need to know the extent to which programs have been hammered by budgetary issues. If the downturn is hideous enough over the next two years, then there will be non-trivial changes in different amounts of support for graduate students as well as faculty movement when those who can flee hemorrhaging departments do so. And to the extent that this does not take place, that will be a good thing for people to know as well.

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  13. David Sobel

    I assume that part of the rationale for wanting to wait longer for the next PGR has to do with the amount of work required to generate the results. Perhaps you could give us outsiders to the process more of a sense of what the costs of the report are so we know what we are asking people to do? Perhaps also, if part of the problem is that a lot of those costs are falling on you, you might consider trying to find others to help with the parts of the process that are still taking up lots of your time.

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