Sheffield Will Not Cooperate with PGR
The Department of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield has made the following announcement: “Prospective postgraduates should note that the Department is not supplying updates and corrections to the 2014 Philosophy Gourmet Report, and should not assume that this report is based on accurate information.”
Good for them! wonder when some US departments will have the courage to follow.
I hope that Sheffield will keep an accurate faculty list posted at its website so that prospective postgraduates and other interested parties can rely on that information. Other interested parties might include those compiling the faculty lists for the Gourmet Report but such provision of the accurate information to those parties would at least be indirect and perhaps therefore not count as cooperation with the report. Yes I am being a bit sarcastic about this. I assume that the point of Sheffield’s statement is symbolic.
First Notting ham, now Sheffield … how many other institutions will join in “The November Statement” ?
To my mind this seems even a bit worse than cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face, rather more like cutting off the nose of potential student’s to spite one’s face.
So first it was the department until recently headed by Jenkins. Now the department headed by Jenny Saul.
And nobody from U Chicago has signed the September Statement. . .
How strange that people should be supportive of colleagues and former colleagues. That’s certainly not the profession that I signed up to work in.
Has anyone checked on how many of the 2012 PGR evaluators (see http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/reportdesc.asp, plus perhaps some further names in the specialty rankings) are signatories to the Sept. Statement? That would be a very good indicator of how effective this protest has been, and how much it will undermine the credibility of the PGR.
I count (roughly) 15 signatories for the September Statement among the 300+ evaluators for the 2012 PGR. Of these, 4 signatories are women among (again, roughly) the 45 female evaluators on the 2012 list. (I’m including this as a data point only because CDJ at NewApps noted a similar statistic for the September Statement here: http://www.newappsblog.com/2014/09/the-september-statement-some-numbers.html.) These numbers don’t factor in the opposition to the PGR registered in the October Statement, but looking quickly at that list, I see an overlap of 3-4 more names with the 2012 PGR list of evaluators.
I last counted 33 of the 2011 evaluators among the signers, 8 of which are women–this is around 11% of the entire group of evaluators and 16% of the women in that group.