Some people have expressed concern over signing the September Statement because they feel it isn’t strong enough. (See, for example, Jessica Wilson’s public facebook post.) Specifically, some people feel the September Statement doesn’t effectively criticize the PGR, or implicitly endorses the PGR.
If you’re one such person, there’s now an October Statement, courtesy of John Protevi. So if you didn’t want to sign the September Statement because you felt it was too conciliatory to rankings or the PGR in general, you can sign the October Statement instead.
Or better yet, you can sign both! There’s nothing inconsistent with signing the former to publicly boycott a Leiter-run PGR (and publicly express solidarity with those who have been treated badly), and then signing the latter to express concern about the general effect of rankings in our profession.
UPDATE: From Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa in the comments thread:
I was part of the discussion in which the September Statement language in question — the bit that has been read by some as suggesting that the ranking system is on the whole valuable — was drafted. The language is this:
“We therefore decline to take the PGR survey, we decline to serve on the PGR advisory board, and we decline to send Professor Leiter information to help him compile the survey (e.g. updated faculty lists and corrections). We are only declining to volunteer our services to the PGR *while it is under the control of Brian Leiter*. With a different leadership structure, the benefits of the guide might be achieved without detriment to our colleague.”
The last sentence — the one at issue here — was a late addition to the statement. It was added in order to further emphasise that the statement did not constitute an objection to the PGR tout court, but only to emphasise that it was the strictly weaker objection to the PGR under Leiter’s control. (Some people were considering signing, but were worried about giving the impression that they were taking a stance against the PGR itself.) The intention was that the statement be explicitly neutral on what attitudes signatories might have toward other possible versions of the PGR. So I can confirm with what I think is some authority Richard Heck’s suggestion [in the comments] that the language was never intended to imply that a Leiter-free PGR would be better than no PGR at all.
In retrospect, I do think that in our efforts to avoid giving the impression that the September Statement represented an anti-PGR stance, we may have inadvertently chosen wording that is suggestive of the opposite; reference to ‘the benefits’ of the PGR does seem to presuppose that there are benefits. This doesn’t entail that there are *net* benefits, but I do see that the sentence on the whole could easily be thought to carry the implicature that there are. It’s hard to write in a way that’s neutral about everything one might want to be neutral about. We did contemplate language like “with a different leadership structure, any benefits there may be to the guide might be achieved without….” but in addition to being super ugly-wordy, this feels like it insinuates that we thought there wasn’t value. We signers of the original statement had no consensus about whether there was value to the PGR, so we aimed not to commit about that question.
Feminist Philosophers 
I’d like to take slight issue, though, with John’s claim that this portion of the September Statement:
‘contains a begged question’.
This wording is completely consistent with the benefits of the PGR being extraordinarily mild ones, and being far, far outweighed by drawbacks. It’s not a claim that the PGR is a net benefit to the profession, for example. And it would be a pretty extreme position to think that there have never, ever been any benefits whatsoever from the PGR.
I’m not sure what to think about the October statement. Without the PGR, I wouldn’t have chosen Sheffield, found a terrific department, fantastic supervisors etc. I chose Sheffield because the PGR said it was strong enough in the Philosophy of Logic – which it was. It would have been extremely hard for me – a graduate from Italy who could hardly speak English at the time – to gather that small, vital piece of information. I’m not saying that I owe the jobs I got to Leiter – I don’t. But, without the PGR, it would have been harder for me to find a way into the Academic world. And that’s hard enough already, as we all know. I get the points about power, bias etc. Perhaps the info I got in 2006 could have been made available without ranking departments, as some have suggested. But, I think, there should be some info, for present and future graduates.
” But, I think, there should be some info, for present and future graduates.”
Yes, absolutely! Not everyone can be in with the in crowd or have access to the right advisors.
Thanks, magicalersatz, I admit I was reading “benefits” as entailing “net benefits.” I think I’ll leave it as it is, but I’ll link to your comment in an update.
PS, even — no, especially! — as a “continental philosopher” (a term with which I have a fraught relation [http://proteviblog.typepad.com/protevi/analytic_and_continental_philosophy/] ) I’m thrilled to be in a post whose title alludes to David Lewis!
I certainly read the September statement’s claim about benefits to be one *net* benefits. And I don’t really think this sentence in the statement: “With a different leadership structure, the benefits of the guide might be achieved without detriment to our colleague.” makes a whole lot of sense if you don’t read it to be a claim about net benefits.
I guess it’s possible to affirm that sentence while also holding that the PGR is a net negative to the profession, but it doesn’t seem to me to be a very natural reading.
John: ew, gross, get your continental germs away from me! ;-)
Matt: I’m not following, I’m afraid. Why can’t the claim you quote just be read as follows. The benefits of the guide – such as they are – could be achieved without harm to Carrie (and others Leiter bullies. . .) if Leiter didn’t control the PGR. That doesn’t say anything at all about net benefits, or make any claim that the PGR doesn’t also come with some serious drawbacks. It’s just claiming that the specific harm to Carrie (and others Leiter bullies) is uniquely due to Leiter’s role in the PGR.
Ha, instead a captcha with just numbers, you need a logic problem; that’ll weed out the continentals!
Magicalersatz: I’m happy with that reading, and I’d be fine with signing the September Statement under that. But I was taking the sentence to imply that there should still be a PGR, only with a different leadership structure. And I was taking *that* to imply that the PGR was a net positive – because if it’s a net negative, it should be disbanded. There’d be no reason for it to have any leadership structure whatsoever.
I have heard this sort of objection from a number of people. I confess to not understanding it. It seems to me completely obvious that the authors of the September Statement (which did not include me) are simply trying to make it clear that they are not targeting the PGR as such. That is, the intention of the remark everyone is over-reading (and the previous one) is to forestall the predictable response from Leiter (which we have, of course, heard) that this is just another group of party line right-wing feminazi continentalist PGR-haters trying to destroy what he has so selflessly offered the field. The point is that *this particular effort* targets PGR only because and in so far and so long as Brian Leiter is its editor, not because of general objections to it. Which does not, of course, preclude one from also having general objections to it—which, as is well, known, I do. So I disagree with Matt and John: I read the sentence in question as “With a different leadership structure, the benefits of the guide, *such as they are (and we are not taking a stand on that)*, might be achieved without detriment to our colleague”. Nothing in the Statement turns on any other reading.
And, with all due respect, I therefore have to disagree with Jessica Wilson, too:
“…[I]t is a major distraction to take the upshot of these unquestionably problematic episodes to be that Leiter should step down from the PGR, since in so doing the deeper crisis affecting our profession—the fact of and destructive impact of implicit bias—will remain unaddressed and moreover be perpetuated. The problem with the PGR is not Leiter, but the associated ranking system, which is tailor-made to encourage and encode implicit bias.”
Yes, yes, but no. This just misunderstands the goal of this effort. Wilson writes as if the goal were to solve a “problem with the PGR”: to improve it by getting Leiter to step down. But that’s just wrong. The goal is deprive Leiter of one major source of the power that he has been abusing. The fact that, in doing so, we do not *also* address the role that PGR plays in propagating implicit bias is, so far as I can see, not relevant. Which is not of course to say that addressing that other issue isn’t important.
I guess what we should try to remember is that it’s really hard to write a statement that pleases everyone. People who support (PGR-style) rankings and people who oppose (PGR-style) rankings can (and should) agree that it is worse if Leiter is PGR editor than if he isn’t. The phraseology in the September Statement that seems to irritate ranking opponents is clearly there to reassure the ranking supporters that signing on is compatible with supporting (PGR-style) rankings. Ranking opponents should recognise that it is a good thing if all those who oppose bullying (including ranking supporters) can sign a unified statement, and so interpret the relevant parts of the statement charitably. The problematic sentence could be read: “With a different leadership structure, the benefits [that some attribute to] the guide might be achieved without detriment to our colleague.” That’s true, right? And it’s all that the authors will have intended.
Let me add one more point. Surely that the authors of the Statement did not mean to exclude people from signing who do have general objections to rankings. What could possibly be the point of that?
I’d have thought it was equally absurd to suppose that anyone would think those of us who have signed have thereby expressed our enthusiasm for rankings, but I guess I’ve just been surprised.
Richard and Daniel: I agree wholeheartedly!
Well, for those who oppose rankings, removing Leiter from the PGR may indeed be worse. It will give the impression that the problems with PGR have been solved, or that new management can solve them. But the problems can’t be solved, because they’re inherent in any reputational survey. And as for Leiter’s power, I think that it now rests primarily on his blog rather than the PGR.
jdvelleman, I’m skeptical that removing Leiter from the rankings will end up being worse for those that oppose rankings in general. Part of the problem with the PGR, I think, has been that it’s the *only* (widely read) ranking of analytic philosophy out there. If there were more ways of ranking philosophy departments – with different but thoughtful methodologies – it would be easier to get out of the headspace that the PGR is somehow ‘the correct’ or ‘the objective’ ranking of philosophy departments. And that could only help, surely, those who think we should be moving toward a profession in which we present information about departments, but don’t rank them.
The problem, of course, is that so long as Leiter is in control of the PGR, there’s a massive disincentive for anyone who wants to try out an alternative ranking system. Just ask Carolyn Jennings!
In response to Velleman’s suggestion that Leiter’s power rests primarily on his blog, I totally agree. Look at the sitemeter stats for Leiter Reports for the past month: http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s19leiterreports&r=35 He’s averaging 15k hits per day, and September 24 was over double that — 35,000 hits in one day. Nobody has the ear of the profession as much, and despite many people claiming to boycott it, it’s still massively read. That’s a problem. After all he’s said, why are we still listening?
B, I agree that Leiter’s blog is a massive source of his influence. But I’m less sure that this influence can really be separated from the PGR. Would philosophers read his blog as much – or care what he has to say as much – if he was no longer in charge of the PGR?
There are still a number of things he’s known for: reporting tenured hires, conducting polls on journal rankings and such, posting questions that are emailed to him that garner a lot of answers, and perhaps other things. Others have sprung up, but he’s still far and away the most popular. So yes, I think until departments stop reporting tenured hires to him, people stop voting on his polls, and people stop answering his questions, people will continue to read his blog.
Maybe I missed something, but I thought that the campaign was about not participating in the PGR as long as Leiter was in charge. Is it about not reading his blog too?
I read lots of things that I don’t agree with: I read the New York Times and the Economist. The fact that I read something does not in any way imply that I endorse its editorial policy or general worldview. I read this blog and do not always agree with it at all, but it has a point of view worth keeping up with, as does Leiter, even if he can be very nasty at times.
If I was going to dedicate myself to only reading stuff which shares my worldview completely, I probably would end up reading nothing at all, not even what I wrote two hours ago.
B, two thoughts here. Firstly, how widely read Leiter’s blog is can be separated from how influential it is. There was a point a while back when NewAPPS was as widely read as Leiter Reports, but none of the NewAPPS bloggers had – I’d wager – the level of influence Leiter has. Now, part of that could be down to NewAPPS being a group blog, but I doubt that’s all of it. I suspect that what Leiter says on his blog is so influential not just because people read it, but because they really pay attention to it – and I suspect that they pay the amount of attention they do at least in part because of the PGR. Secondly, one main reason people follow Leiter’s blog is for the hiring news (I’m less convinced people care much about the polls, but who knows. . .). But departments might not be in such a hurry to report that sort of news to Leiter if he didn’t run the PGR.
s. wallerstein: yes, the boycott campaign of the September Statement is about the (Leiter-run) PGR, not about his blog. People are boycotting the PGR because they think it’s what gives Leiter the amount of professional stature that can make his bullying so harmful. This has been queried – jdvelleman at 13, for example, suggests that it is Leiter’s blog, and not his role in the PGR, that gives him power (and thus makes his bullying so problematic). Hence this discussion.
Magicalersatz,
There’s a big difference between boycotting the PGR while Leiter is in charge and boycotting his blog qua blog.
The PGR, as I understand it, is seen as an official or semi-official ranking system and
I can understand that you don’t want someone with Leiter’s temperment to be in charge of it: the boycot is thus a vote of no-confidence, so to speak.
Leiter’s blog represents Leiter, no one else and has no official or semi-official status.
What would you think if Leiter were to suggest that readers boycot the Feminist Philosophers Blog?
Yes, s. wallerstein, I understand that there is quite a big difference there.
I have not at any point encouraged anyone to boycott Leiter’s blog. I have encouraged people to sign the September Statement in order to publicly boycott a Leiter-run PGR. My discussion of his blog on this thread has only been to address the question of whether, in urging people to sign the September Statement (and thus boycott the PGR), I’m mistaking the real source of Leiter’s influence. That’s it.
Hmm, I don’t want to pour cold water on a good thing. But I wonder if it’s really *possible* that philosophy go without rankings. my feeling is that if leiter doesn’t do it, *someone* will.
This is not to oppose the october statement — expressing a disapproval of rankings and encouraging their abandonment is, I think, probaby a good thing. But I also wonder if the best things is to have the least evil rankings we *can* have, if we must have rankings.
I suppose I’m personally torn between no rankings and a plurality of rankings (including assessments of grad satisfaction).
anon, like you I don’t expect it to be possible to go without. I lean in favor of a plurality of information, which would unavoidably result in a plurality of rankings. I mentioned this on Pea Soup today:
Inevitably, if rich information databases exist in future decades, then if students or faculty notice that a few schools have the most publications in Ethics, or the best placement record of minority-identifying students, they are going to say so. If one wants to be where X happens most, one is highly likely to seek out, and announce the results of a search, as to where X happens most.
(And on a related post: Philosophy does not need rankings, but I also hold that rankings are, in fact, inevitable on whatever dimensions are available. (If lots of info about departments that engage in X is available, someone who cares about X will likely seek out, and likely share with others, what departments do X more and better than others.))
As always, Kate, what you say seems wise.
I feel torn on the issue, because while I grant that there are very serious problems with rankings (of any kind), there do also seem to be benefits – especially for those students who don’t have the luxury of in-group advice. And, as you say, there’s a sense of inevitability about rankings in philosophy (philosophers are going to rank stuff – whether formally or informally, explicitly or implicitly). This leaves me wondering whether the best way forward isn’t a plurality of rankings. Having lots of rankings – along different metrics, with different methodologies – would still provide information to students (and gossip for philosophers) but ease the thought that there’s a single way to measure ‘the top departments’.
But more to the point, these – complicated, important – issues seem to me largely orthogonal to whether one should sign the September Statement!
I was part of the discussion in which the September Statement language in question — the bit that has been read by some as suggesting that the ranking system is on the whole valuable — was drafted. The language is this:
“We therefore decline to take the PGR survey, we decline to serve on the PGR advisory board, and we decline to send Professor Leiter information to help him compile the survey (e.g. updated faculty lists and corrections). We are only declining to volunteer our services to the PGR *while it is under the control of Brian Leiter*. With a different leadership structure, the benefits of the guide might be achieved without detriment to our colleague.”
The last sentence — the one at issue here — was a late addition to the statement. It was added in order to further emphasise that the statement did not constitute an objection to the PGR tout court, but only to emphasise that it was the strictly weaker objection to the PGR under Leiter’s control. (Some people were considering signing, but were worried about giving the impression that they were taking a stance against the PGR itself.) The intention was that the statement be explicitly neutral on what attitudes signatories might have toward other possible versions of the PGR. So I can confirm with what I think is some authority Richard Heck’s suggestion that the language was never intended to imply that a Leiter-free PGR would be better than no PGR at all.
In retrospect, I do think that in our efforts to avoid giving the impression that the September Statement represented an anti-PGR stance, we may have inadvertently chosen wording that is suggestive of the opposite; reference to ‘the benefits’ of the PGR does seem to presuppose that there are benefits. This doesn’t entail that there are *net* benefits, but I do see that the sentence on the whole could easily be thought to carry the implicature that there are. It’s hard to write in a way that’s neutral about everything one might want to be neutral about. We did contemplate language like “with a different leadership structure, any benefits there may be to the guide might be achieved without….” but in addition to being super ugly-wordy, this feels like it insinuates that we thought there wasn’t value. We signers of the original statement had no consensus about whether there was value to the PGR, so we aimed not to commit about that question.
Thanks very much, Jonathan – extremely helpful. I’ve added your comment to the post in a update.
I sincerely hope this isn’t an issue where philosophers will let the best be the enemy of the good.
The reasonableness of the reading back @5 simply could have been acknowledged and clarified — without dismissiveness and condescension, and no need for insider confirmation. A sincere recognition of this, as compared to hope that philosophers nevertheless will do what others think is good, might be a helpful sign of mutual respect.
There is an aspect of PGR which hasn’t been discussed much: it can seem altruistic in making public “insider” information. On this view, inside top schools there is a generally shared sense for which schools are the best; and this shared sense of the cream of the crop is used in deciding who gets into grad schools at those programs, who gets the teaching positions there, who gets tenure there, etc. Call this it “the implicit insider rankings”.
The purported aim of PGR is one of public service: to make these implicit insider rankings public, so that people outside of the top schools can use them, and so enhance their chances, if they are “talented” enough, to make it into the top depts. PGR promises a rags to riches possibility: “Just because you don’t go to top schools, you don’t have to get left behind. Here is what those top people are thinking. With this information, you can improve your chances of becoming one of us.” This partly explains why, as Richard Heck has noted on his blog, more than a third of the board members are from the top ten schools. That is needed to show that PGR is tracking what the top schools implicitly think. PGR isn’t just a reputational survey; it is meant to be a reputational survey of the people “in the know”.
This altruistic aim, as any reader of Nietzsche can imagine, has a darker side. When there was no internet, the implicit insider rankings were secure from “the masses” of professional philosophers, since most philosophers don’t hang out around Harvard Sq, or Princeton, or now Washington Square, etc. But with the rise of the internet, you could have any “mediocre” philosopher speaking into a public space regarding what he or she thinks is the ranking of depts., and so the implicit insider rankings could lose their power. So what is needed in the new medium is something which affirms the implicit insider rankings against this new threat. Enter PGR. Leiter sensed, perhaps unconsciously, that the only way the implicit insider rankings can survive the internet is if they become “explicit insider rankings”. And Leiter wasn’t the only one. This is what, consciously or unconsciously, the board and the people filling out the surveys were doing as well. The aim of helping the students is a way of keeping the status quo; the sense of the insider, privileged group can persist by seeming open to everyone.
When people say there shouldn’t be rankings like PGR, what do they mean? Leiter has used the following argument effectively over the years: if a person not from a top school says there shouldn’t be rankings, they are just jealous; if a person from a top school says there shouldn’t be rankings, they are hypocritical, since in choosing to be at a top school they are implicitly affirming the insider rankings. Many defenders of Leiter seem to be now using just this argument.
I am quite certain that nobody intended dismissiveness or condescension. That reading is obviously a widespread one. I myself found the insider confirmation of what was intended to be useful, and I hope that others do too.
I think Jonathan’s backstory at post 25 is a really helpful clarification.
We should also be aware that Brian’s blog at least sometimes provides a platform for people in the profession who might otherwise not have much of an audience. I’m thinking of the various ‘confused overseas grad student’, ‘concerned junior faculty member,’ etc. he also publicizes things like the 3 am contributions, from which I’ve benefitted both as interviewee and as a reader of 3 am.
BV @ 28 makes some very good points.
Yes, anon’, what Jenny says. I’m a fan of the September Statement and I hope people sign it.
But I also have sincere respect for those who thoughtfully choose not to sign it.
Hi, Bharath. As usual, there is much wisdom in what you say. Your analysis of the underlying power structure that produced and sustains PGR is extremely convincing. I’d love to post it, or some version of it that did not depend upon the present context, on my blog. Email me if that sounds like a good idea.
I’ll answer your question at the end, but only for myself, of course.
I tend to think there should be no rankings because, even if all the methodological (etc) problems that plague PGR could be solved, I agree:
(i) With something David Chalmers and many others have said, to the effect that there is no possible way any ranking could fail to encode professional biases and value judgements (which PGR does in well-known ways);
(ii) With Jenny Saul and others that it is at least incredibly difficult, maybe impossible, for any such ranking not to encode other sorts of biases, such as gender bias; and so
(iii) With you that any ranking that will have any kind of influence will be inherently conservative, i.e., will tend to reinforce and legitimize whatever biases it encodes.
It’s worth noting, I guess, that, if (i) were the only problem, then that might speak in favor of a plurality of rankings (as Weatherson suggested). But if one takes (ii) seriously, that argues in favor of no rankings (unless what is incredibly difficult can be done successfully). Sadly, I’m not sure that is realistic, though. Maybe pluralism is the best we can do.
PS Since we haven’t been in touch in a while, here’s a very public “Hello, hope you’re well”!
Once again, let me make it clear that I’m not a philosopher, so I’ll speak of rankings in general.
If there is no system of ranking, people select on the basis of various factors: among them, their personal prejudices, their implicit biases, what their often uninformed family and friends suggest, their vague notions that a certain institution is prestigious, the fact that some famous professor teaches or taught at a certain institution (although he or she may be well past their prime), the fact that they’ve heard of a certain institution frequently (its name brand, so to speak), rumors and gossip, Heidegger’s “one says”, etc., etc.
I speak from personal experience and from that of friends and family members.
Whether or not there is a system of rankings, people rank insofar as they prefer one institution to another, in an often confused fashion.
The best solution seems to be a pluralistic system of rankings, so that people can compare what one evaluation says to another, seeing the merits and defects of each institution explicitly explained according to clear-cut criteria, each system of ranking making clear its criteria.
Richard, hello as well. And I will email you. (To be clear for others: I was a graduate student at Harvard while Richard was a professor there.)
I think as well that there should not be any global rankings; as others have emphasized and are working on, there might be personalizable rankings based on data, or pluralistic rankings. But whether there are rankings like this, or no rankings at all, it still raises a big question: On what basis will people get into programs or get jobs at depts such as NYU, Harvard or Brown, etc.? I mention these programs not because they are objectively the best in terms of philosophy, but because there are some objective measures in which they seem “at the top”. Roughly, these benefits are material (salary, teaching load, etc.), social (being in a private institution and a step removed from state govt cuts), and platform (having prestige in the broader society). These benefits can’t be ignored as philosophically irrelevant, since they can lead to benefits for doing philosophy; better salaries and less teaching can lead to more time for research, name recognition of one’s school can lead to more exposure in public spaces, etc. There is a reason why Rawls just moved between Princeton, Cornell, MIT and Harvard; Lewis went just from Harvard to Princeton and so on. One imagines the material benefits translate into intellectual freedom, which translates into better philosophical work.
It seems to me people defending PGR have the following worry: “The depts with the material benefits loom large in the professional consciousness; most of the “greats” of the 20th century are connected to those departments, and even the people against PGR who are at “top” depts don’t go very down the PGR rankings in their career. But if there is no PGR, then these departments will become much less open to people who are not at them. Even suppose there are pluralistic rankings. How are current philosophers at Harvard or Brown going to use those rankings in evaluating undergraduate students for grad programs, or grad students for jobs there? How can they use rankings, say, in post-structural continental philosophy or in Indian philosophy if the philosophers there have little knowledge of those areas?”
These questions open Pandora’s box for the philosophy profession. I imagine the appeal of Leiter’s blustery attitude and PGR for many people is that he seems to be holding off this box from getting opened. As if PGR connects one to the philosophical world of Russell, Quine and Strawson, none of whom had to explain why they didn’t engage with continental thinkers or non-Western thinkers or feminist philosophers, etc. To imagine that we have to deal with these issues when the great philosophers of “our” tradition didn’t can make people feel as if their tradition is being taken away from them. This is how I read Chalmers, Schaffer, Siegel and Stanley’s almost obsequious letter to Leiter. Why are they interested in Leiter securing his “legacy to the profession as the creator of a thriving PGR”, that too after knowing how he uses his role with PGR in being abusive to colleagues? Because as long as PGR is secure, it can feel like Pandora’s box isn’t being opened.
To counter this, I think it isn’t enough to simply call for ending PGR or rankings. Dealing with the Pandora’s box being opened requires a great deal of philosophical skill and compassion. It is important to start articulating new philosophical questions and projects for enabling to do this, and to not avoid this by saying, “but I just do phil of mind, or ethics, etc.”. Without this momentum of starting a new, more inclusive tradition now, criticisms of PGR can seem utopian, as if by getting rid of rankings we will all be comrades.
Bharath Vallabha @28, I think your comment is dead-on.
Also, I’m struck that sometimes the “insider” information that would be most helpful to prospective graduate students is which faculty in a department are likely to harass a student (sexually or otherwise) and which other faculty are likely to be of no help whatsoever in the event that one is harassed. So far, this has not been information provided by PGR.