Adventures in Philosophy at Notre Dame

Chapter 7: Professional Philosophy

227 ChAPter 7 Professional Philosophy RAnkInGs Time was when aspiring philosophers had little help in choosing among graduate schools beyond advice from their undergraduate teachers. My own experience around 1950 is a case in point. Of my three main teachers at Grinnell, two (Hippocrates George Apostle and Paul Kuntz) had PhDs from Harvard, and one (Neal Klausner) a PhD from Yale. Having been accepted by the graduate programs of both institutions , I set about trying to evaluate their relative merits. But the only relevant information I could find was limited to faculty rosters and publication lists. Not knowing how to proceed from there, I finally deferred to the majority of my teachers and went to Harvard to begin my graduate training. This dearth of information about graduate programs ended in the late 1980s with the advent of the Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR).1 PGR began as an impromptu list of twenty-five graduate programs in philosophy deemed by its founder, Brian Leiter, to be the best in the country. Leiter was a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Michigan at the time,2 and his list initially was intended as an aid to Michigan undergraduates contemplating a career in philosophy. Updated regularly, Leiter’s list soon became popular among graduate students as well, who passed it on to friends in other universities. From Pluralism to Professionalism 228 The first publicly available issue of PGR covered the academic year 1991–92. It divided top U.S. graduate programs into nine groups, without further ranking within particular groups. Group 1 contained Princeton exclusively, with Harvard, Pittsburgh, Michigan, and UCLA in the second group. ND shared the ninth group (twenty-second to twenty-seventh) with five other schools. The next report, for 1994–95, distinguished ten groups instead of nine. Princeton again was alone at the top, with Pittsburgh now the sole occupant of the second rank. And ND again was in the lowest group (twenty-fourth to thirty-first) along with seven other programs. This apparent demotion coincided with the departure from ND of Eleonore Stump (in 1993) and Alasdair MacIntyre (in 1995) and the retirement of Ernan McMullin (in 1994). After this low point in 1994–95, ND began to gain ground with a series of key appointments. On the senior level, Peter van Inwagen came from Syracuse in 1995. Jaegwon Kim began sharing time with ND in 1999,3 Alasdair MacIntyre returned from Duke in 2000, and Robert Audi shifted part of his gravitas to the Philosophy Department from ND’s Business School in 2004. Junior appointments during that period included Leiter acolyte Ted Warfield in 1995 and highly touted ND graduate (and Harvard PhD) Tom Kelly in 2003. These appointments were enough to boost ND’s Gourmet rank to a four-way tie for twelfth in 2004 (by which time ties had replaced groupings).4 Within PGR’s first dozen years of existence, ND had increased its rank by at least ten notches, a notable improvement to say the least. In its initial form, Leiter’s report was intended to help undergraduates locate programs for advanced training in philosophy. As it gained popularity in the 1990s, however, its influence spread to other aspects of the profession as well. For one thing, philosophy departments tend to hire new faculty from programs more prominent than themselves. All but one or two of the young PhDs hired by ND’s department during the 1990s, for example, came from programs with higher rankings in the 1994–95 Leiter report. A consequence of this general tendency is that PhDs from highly ranked departments often have more choices when they go on the job market. High PGR rank- Professional Philosophy 229 ings thus improve not only a given department’s ability to attract good graduate students but also its ability to find good jobs for its own PhDs. Desire to maintain or to improve its PGR rankings also affects a department’s hiring of senior faculty. A department will usually show preference for senior people who are well known in the profession over others with perhaps comparable achievements but lower profiles. As I recall from faculty meetings, all senior professors brought to ND with tenure during the 1990s (Stump, van Inwagen, Howard, ShraderFrechette ) were vetted with an eye toward their impact on future rankings . These investments in high-profile personnel eventually paid off, as indicated by ND’s improved rankings toward...