January 2009
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What Can Non-Elite PhD Programs Do to Help Their Students?
There is a discussion of the topic here, including interesting comments about the importance of publications for graduate students.
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PGR Publication Schedule
By tomorrow, I hope to send to the Advisory Board the full specialty ranking results, for review and discussion about faculties not included in the evaluation exercise which ought to be added to the specialties. I am hoping a week after that to have finalized those rankings, as well as updated the other sections of…
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The “Top Ten” Faculties in Ethics in the English-Speaking World
"Ethics" here includes normative ethics, practical reasoning, and moral psychology, but excludes applied ethics and metaethics, which were ranked separately. In the specialty rankings, faculties are grouped according to their mean score rounded to the nearest .5. The median and mode scores are listed in parentheses after the school name; within a group, the faculties…
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Top 20 Faculties in the English-Speaking World Based on New PGR Surveys
The mean score is listed in parentheses; the PGR will also report the median score. 1. New York University (4.9) 2. Oxford University (4.7) 3. Rutgers University, New Brunswick (4.6) 4. Princeton University (4.3) 5. University of Pittsburgh (4.2) 6. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (4.1) 7. Harvard University (4.0) 7. Massachussetts Institute of Technology (4.0) 9. Yale University (3.9) 10. Stanford University (3.8) 10. University…
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Is the Market for Laterals and Visitors about to Dry Up?
One thing I've been hearing a lot is that one effect of the financial crisis, and the massive decline in endowments (25% and up) of the top universities, is that the market for lateral hires and visiting professors is, like the credit market (but not as badly!), going to become quite tight. We'll have to…
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Joe “the Plumber” Joins Right-Wing Pajamas Media
Matthew Bodie (St. Louis), who called this to my attention, writes: "He's visiting Israel as a correspondent for Pajamas Media. I'm wondering how the Volokh folks feel about being on the same team as Joe?"
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Top Faculties in (most of the) History of Philosophy Specialty Areas
These were the faculties that had the highest rounded mean score in some of the major history of philosophy specialties; I have omitted the median and mode score here, but they will appear in the PGR. Faculties are listed alphabetically where there is more than one with the same rounded mean score in the top…
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Yet More on the Israeli Attack on Gaza
Yitzhak Melamed (Johns Hopkins) writes: While the scope of the IDF's atrocities in Gaza in unraveling–including an explicit admission by a top Israeli army officer, Gadi Eisenkott, that "We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective these [the villages]…
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Some truths about lying…
…from Jerry Dworkin (UC Davis)–and even if they aren’t true, I’m sure he’s not lying.
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Preview of the Overall Survey Results for the New PGR: Breadth Has Rewards!
260 philosophers participated in the "overall" survey of faculty quality just completed. A number of faculties had noticeable improvements in their overall rank, in each case connected to tangible changes in faculty membership. (You can get a reasonably good snapshot of changes in faculty composition since the 2006 surveys here, though there are some important…
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Current Dean Searches
Alfred Brophy (North Carolina) is keeping track.
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Previews of PGR Survey Results Coming…
…this week, starting tomorrow or Tuesday at the latest. We’re still transcribing specialty area results, but the overall survey results are in.
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The Case for a Boycott and Divestment Campaign Against Israel
Well-stated here.
I disagree with the perspectives described here and wrote with my co-authors on the very real catastrophic potential of AI…