Description of the Report

This report ranks graduate programs primarily on the basis of the quality of faculty. In late August and early September 2002, I conducted an on-line survey of not quite 300 philosophers throughout the English-speaking world; roughly 60% responded and completed the reputational surveys. (Another 4-5% of those invited responded after the deadline, expressing their regrets for having been unable to participate this year.) That represented a 50% increase in the total number of respondents from last year.

The survey presented 90 faculty lists--54 in the US, 9 in Canada, 18 in the United Kingdom, and 9 in Australasia. Note that there are some 110 PhD-granting programs in the U.S. alone, but it would be unduly burdensome for evaluators to ask them to evaluate all these programs each year. The top programs in each region were selected for evaluation (the top 50 in the US, plus runners-up; the top 15 in the UK; the top 5 in Australasia and Canada), plus a few additional programs are included each year to “test the waters.” (In the US, this year, for example, Loyola/Chicago and Missouri/Columbia were included.) So far, in all cases, the extra programs evaluated have not come close to cracking the top 50/15/5 threshholds.

The survey began with the following instructions:

Please evaluate the following programs in terms of faculty quality, using the following scale:

5 - Distinguished
4 - Strong
3 - Good
2 - Adequate
1 - Marginal
0 - Inadequate for a PhD program

You may use .5 intervals if necessary, but no scores higher than 5.0, and no smaller fractions, are permitted. Do not check any box if you lack sufficient information to make an informed judgment about faculty quality.

You should not evaluate either (1) your own department, or (2) the department from which you received your highest graduate degree (typically the PhD or the DPhil). Those scores will be discounted.

“Faculty quality” should be taken to encompass the quality of philosophical work and talent represented by the faculty and the range of areas they cover, with the two weighted as you think appropriate. Since the rankings are used by prospective students, about to embark on a multi-year course of study, you may also take in to account, as you see fit, considerations like the status (full-time, part-time) of the faculty; the age of the faculty (as a somewhat tenuous guide to prospective availability, not quality); and the quality of training the faculty provide, to the extent you have information about this.

Please begin by printing out and reviewing the faculty lists before you begin assigning scores.

The faculty lists are based on current information as to their shape for fall 2003, and are confined to full- or part-time faculty (status indicated), excluding lecturers, but including those with joint appointments in Philosophy and another unit. Emeritus faculty are also excluded.

The lists that followed indicated which faculty were over 70, which were over 80, and which were part-time.

Different respondents had different "centers of gravity" in their scoring: some gave no 5s, others gave no score lower than a 2. It was also clear that respondents had different philosophies of evaluation: some clearly tried to consider the breadth of strength in a department, while others ranked a program highly or lowly based simply on its strength in his or her fields. The range of evaluations for single departments should be a cautionary note to all undergraduates about relying too much on the advice of just one or two faculty advisors. Idiosyncrasy abounds, even at top departments!

As in the past, I did not include the name of the university with the faculty lists. This has proved beneficial in forcing evaluators to respond to the current faculty. As one respondent put it last year (in a comment echoed by several more evaluators this year): "surprisingly tough to say what I think, without the institutional halo effect front loaded." (The National Research Council has also noted the distortions produced by the "halo effect," though has not taken any steps to avoid them.)

Evaluators were selected with an eye to balance, in terms of area, age and educational background--though since, in all cases, the opinions of research-active faculty were sought, there was, necessarily, a large number of alumni of the top programs represented. Approximately half those surveyed were philosophers who had filled out the surveys in previous years; the other half were nominated by members of the Advisory Board, who picked research-active faculty in their fields.

Despite the increase in the total number, and diversity, of respondents, the results were remarkably stable from prior years: where there were changes, there were rational reasons for those changes. So, e.g., departments that had noticeable drops had suffered significant faculty losses: examples would be Harvard (lost Anthony Appiah, Michael Blake, Robert Nozick, James Pryor) and Cornell (lost Karen Jones, Frederick Neuhouser, Jennifer Whiting, and Sydney Shoemaker to retirement). Departments that had noticeable gains had made significant additions to their faculty: examples would be Columbia (Frederick Neuhouser, Alison Wylie), Arizona (Terence Horgan, and Keith Lehrer came out of retirement), Texas (Michael Tye), Duke (Allen Buchanan), Syracuse (Frederick Beiser, Andre Gallois, as well as junior faculty), and Rice (Alastair Norcross). A few departments had shifts in rankings (up and down) that are probably just “noise” or random fluctuations: for example, Illinois/Urbana, Illinois/Chicago, Southern California.

As in prior year, most evaluators were conscientious and methodical, first printing out faculty lists, and taking time to review them (and in some cases research them) before completing the survey. The following message from an evaluator nominated by a Board member is illustrative:

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to participate in the PGR survey. I found it a surprisingly valuable and informative experience. I spent quite a lot of time looking at departmental Web sites, analyzing CVs, and so forth, and I’m sure many of your respondents do the same thing. Indeed, the work has given me a new appreciation for the rankings, since it seems more evident to me than ever that they distil vast amounts of information and correct for biases of individual reviewers. I don’t think I’m especially scrupulous about such matters, so if I spent hours ensuring that I am sufficiently familiar with numerous departments and individual philosophers to make an informed evaluation, others must surely have done the same.

Here are the philosophers, by field, who filled out reputational surveys this year. The school from which the evaluator received the PhD (or equivalent) is listed in parentheses. A very rough characterization of the philosopher’s area(s) is given, as follows: M&E (metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language & mind), S (philosophy of science, including physics, biology, and social science), L (mathematical and philosophical logic), V (theory of value, including moral, political and legal philosophy and aesthetics), H (history of philosophy through Kant), C (Continental philosophy, i.e., German and French philosophy of the 19th- and 20th-centuries). Decision theory (and cognate fields) are listed under a mix of S, L and V, depending on the focus of the philosopher’s work.

Note that faculty were not permitted to evaluate their own department or the department from which they had received their PhD. Here are the 177 evaluators:

Many philosophers and students have inquired over the years about whether the rankings are affected by the areas of the evaluators. The answer is: only very slightly. Based on the somewhat broad categorizations noted earlier—M&E, Value, History, Science—only those working in philosophy of science had significant differences in evaluation, and then only for a handful of cases. Roughly 1 out of every 9 evaluators this year worked in philosophy of science, a proportion not out of line with their representation in most major PhD programs.

Remember: what follows are not rankings of programs based on their strength in the indicated areas! The striking things about these results is precisely how little they differ, despite the differing areas of expertise of the evaluators. This confirms that philosophy is a remarkably coherent discipline: historians, value theorists, philosophers of science, metaphysicians, epistemologists have strikingly similar views about program quality

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