PGR 2009: St Andrews
It's that time of year again. Well, it's really biennial, but it feels like every year week. The new Philosophical Gourmet Report (2009) is out. We've seen previews on the Leiter Report for some time already, so no need to rehearse the generals. I try not to get too involved in the heated debate about the value and content of the PGR, but I've generally linked to ranking info in the Elsewhere in the Blogosphere section (see sidebar). This post, of course, is nothing but a shameless little plug for the St Andrews department. Actually, a shameless plug for the joint St Andrews/Stirling effort, since the two departments rank together (for reasons I won't dwell with). It's cheating, basically.
In the overall ranking for the English speaking world the programme is ranked shared 17th, which is no real change from the last PGR. I think we ought to be pretty satisfied with this; it brings us into the same bracket as CUNY, Notre Dame, and Toronto. In the UK ranking we stay ranked as number two, reasonably enough far behind Oxford (2nd overall), but ahead of Cambridge. Without selling my home institution short, I do perhaps think that Cambridge is underrated. At any rate, they probably perform better against St Andrews and Stirling individually.
In the Philosophical Logic speciality St Andrews is placed in the 4th bracket with a mean of 3.75. I believe this is a drop from last PGR, probably due to Crispin's NYU move. This is similar to the situation with the Philosophy of Mathematics speciality (mean 4.0). In Mathematical Logic we score a mean of 3.5. All scores appear reasonable, but I do hope we'll improve now that the FLC project has officially started. Once two new post doctoral researchers are in place there will certainly be more activity. Yet, any real advance must be preceded by a senior appointment, and with the current financial situation it does not appear all too likely.
A score that is really good news is our 1st place in The History of Analytic Philosophy (incl. Wittgenstein) - mean score 4.5. Clearly we are here helped by a significant research presence in Stirling.
Although I don't belong to the ranking skeptics (I believe that the rankings do serve a useful purpose for potential grad students), a lesser worry might be useful to raise. As the Report itself notes, some of specialities have a very limited number of evaluators (e.g., Phil of Math with 6; contrast Philosophy of Language with 52). Considering the potentially large area of research covered by one PGR-speciality this might be unhealthy. Even more worrying, perhaps, is the fact that so few people in these specialities choose to participate in the evaluation. True, there are fewer experts available in philosophy of mathematics than in language, but the above ratio probably misrepresents the situation.
In the overall ranking for the English speaking world the programme is ranked shared 17th, which is no real change from the last PGR. I think we ought to be pretty satisfied with this; it brings us into the same bracket as CUNY, Notre Dame, and Toronto. In the UK ranking we stay ranked as number two, reasonably enough far behind Oxford (2nd overall), but ahead of Cambridge. Without selling my home institution short, I do perhaps think that Cambridge is underrated. At any rate, they probably perform better against St Andrews and Stirling individually.
In the Philosophical Logic speciality St Andrews is placed in the 4th bracket with a mean of 3.75. I believe this is a drop from last PGR, probably due to Crispin's NYU move. This is similar to the situation with the Philosophy of Mathematics speciality (mean 4.0). In Mathematical Logic we score a mean of 3.5. All scores appear reasonable, but I do hope we'll improve now that the FLC project has officially started. Once two new post doctoral researchers are in place there will certainly be more activity. Yet, any real advance must be preceded by a senior appointment, and with the current financial situation it does not appear all too likely.
A score that is really good news is our 1st place in The History of Analytic Philosophy (incl. Wittgenstein) - mean score 4.5. Clearly we are here helped by a significant research presence in Stirling.
Although I don't belong to the ranking skeptics (I believe that the rankings do serve a useful purpose for potential grad students), a lesser worry might be useful to raise. As the Report itself notes, some of specialities have a very limited number of evaluators (e.g., Phil of Math with 6; contrast Philosophy of Language with 52). Considering the potentially large area of research covered by one PGR-speciality this might be unhealthy. Even more worrying, perhaps, is the fact that so few people in these specialities choose to participate in the evaluation. True, there are fewer experts available in philosophy of mathematics than in language, but the above ratio probably misrepresents the situation.
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5 comments:
Re: ration of philosophers of math to philosophers of language: a 1 : 10 ratio seems about right to me, no? (That's not to say of course that phil of language is 10 times more important than phil of math!)
Although having a joint ranking for St Andrews and Stirling does seem a bit like cheating, given that the PGR is supposed to be a ranking of postgraduate programmes, I think this is probably a reasonable reflection of the joint programme run by the two departments.
Where I think St Andrews (along with some other universities) does have an unfair advantage is in the number of part-time and visiting faculty. This arguably has a lot less effect on the majority of postgraduate students than the resulting rankings would suggest. Although relevant faculty members are marked as part-time on the questionnaires, there is no formal system for scaling the results (as there are for the RAE, for example), and I suspect that such universities do disproportionately well as a result.
Richard:
Agree, I was a bit hasty. I think it'still worrying though that the evaluation is based on such a small number of experts.
Keith:
I think you're right about the part time faculty. I'm not sure how they are counted in the rankings, but it seems right that their impact on the graduate course is disproportionally small (even though for research the opposite is perhaps the case).
I don't understand why you would agree with the comment about part-time faculty. And I don't understand how this could possibly be construed as an 'unfair' advantage.
The truth is that the part time appointments have played a negligible role in this years PGR. This year we added to our faculty list the part time appointments of Jonathan Schaffer, Francois Recanati, Jason Stanley, and Brian Weatherson, and the full time appointment of Herman Cappelen. Nevertheless, this has not counterweighted the fact that Crispin is now counted as full time at NYU. This seems to indicate that full time appointments play a significantly more important role in people's evaluations.
The point, however, is that the part time faculty members at St Andrews make important contributions to seminars, research, and to graduate supervision. And although these professors are only in St Andrews for a limited period of time each year, supervision of graduate students continue throughout the entire academic year. This is an invaluable research to graduate students and certainly not an 'unfair' advantage.
It's obvious that the part time faculty members have a positive effect only on the graduate students working in their areas of expertise, but that's a moot point, since that's true for any faculty member, part time or full time.
So, while I agree that it's an advantage to have these part time appointments listed, there is nothing 'unfair' about it. If anything, I would have expected it to carry more weight in this years PGR (as it rightly should have.)
Anders
Re Ole's "it seems right that their impact on the graduate course is disproportionally small", I would have to agree with Anders.
There can be no question that the part-time hires has had a huge impact on the graduate community. Roughly half the graduate students at St Andrews are in Arché, and most of those are supervised, or have close interaction with, one or more of these part-time facutly members.
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