This is a useful post, but it’s overly charitable. I think it’s a mischaracterization to say that what Leiter did to Drabek, “Current Student,” and especially McKinnon is what “some took to be unfair and hostile.” That makes it sound like it’s up for debate: it’s not. What he wrote was very clearly unfair and hostile.

Leiter may have substantive disagreements with Jennings over the methodology of placement records, but making personal attacks while expressing that disagreement is unacceptable. Full stop.

What worries me is that people seem unwilling to engage with Carolyn’s methodology (which she has been very open about), but rather are willing to accept that Brian is right and that, therefore, Carolyn is being “dangerous.” But are such people even analyzing what Brian’s criticisms amount to? For example, he thinks it ludicrous that one would lump together different kinds of TT jobs (2-2, 3-3, 4-4, etc). I think Brian’s objection is wrong-headed: he can’t seem to fathom that many in our profession prefer 4-4 to 2-2, and so the 4-4 job is “better” for them. I suspect that he thinks that 2-2 jobs are somehow objectively better than 4-4 jobs. But that view is out of touch with reality.

Carolyn Dicey-Jennings’ work here is not only not dangerous. It is vital to the discipline. For far too long, graduate departments have been essentially unaccountable for their placement rates. This unaccountability has profoundly harmed countless individuals, ruining the lives/career prospects of grad students who either never make it through their programs or who do but never find permanent jobs. Dicey-Jennings’ work promises to finally hold programs accountable for this. And as long as she is willing to qualify and update her findings in response to new data (which she has done), she is doing nothing dangerous. Programs whose placement rates have been misreported so far have every right and ability to rectify the matter, so that Dicey-Jennings’ results reflect the facts. And facts are facts.

I think many of us are being a little uncharitable, here. I think it’s clear that Prof. Leiter means well but is simply unaware of certain unconscious and ‘aggressive’ emotions he has that have been conditioned by his own particular position in the discipline. Were he to become aware of those responses and their etiology, I am sure that he would be more able to see them for what they are and keep them in check. I suggest that we gather a list of philosophers who have written extensively on this phenomenon and, in the spirit of intellectual openness and good-will, have him read those philosophers. Here’s my first suggestion for the list: Nietzsche.

I am particularly interested in two of the topics that have been discussed here: the idea that one might defend Leiter by arguing for the effectiveness of being nasty; and the importance, in evaluating a department’s placement, of keeping separate the *type* of job a candidate lands.

On the first: being nasty seems, to me, especially ineffective at accomplishing a critical task. I try very hard not to listen to nasty criticism, and I take the critic less seriously for his apparent inability to distinguish between the defensibility of my claims and the tone appropriate in addressing that defensibility. I imagine I’m not unique in this regard, although it’s an empirical question.

On the second: some people may care very much about placement by job type, and they’ll want to look at a different evaluation from CDJ’s. However, some people just want to know how successful a department is at getting it’s students a position that lets them do philosophy for a living, and such an evaluation will be helpful to such a person. Many of my own graduate school colleagues, pessimistic about the market, spoke very much in this way: a philosophy job is the goal. And when I, on the market (from a PGR 30s ranked program), chatted with a student from a PGR top 5 department, he lamented his department’s inability to get its students non-research jobs. His experience was that his colleagues who weren’t good enough to land those 2-2 research jobs then struck out on the market, because Midwest State College, or Tiny Liberal Arts R Us wouldn’t take his CV as expressing genuine interest in what they were doing. Although he ended up succeeding in getting that ultimately desired 2-2 job, he expressed an appreciation of my department’s success at getting it’s students *a job*, at a variety of types of institutions.

One thing I’d really like to know is this:
Leiter says that that the placement rate is calculated nonsensically, and that this is so obvious that he is mystified that anyone would think the comparison is relevant.

I don’t know about everyone else, but if someone says something to me that seems so obviously false that it is mystifying to me why anyone would say that, I usually try to clarify what they meant: on the assumption that it is more likely, or at least a live possibility, that I am misinterpreting rather than that my interlocutor has said something ‘so obviously nonsensical that it is completely mystifying why anyone would say it.’

So, the thing I would really like to know is if Leiter asked Dicey Jennings why she calculated the placement rate that way before posting. If not, then it seems like his been pretty uncharitable in at least one way.

A dirty secret: I am a reviewer for the PGR. I am also unusually well plugged into the profession. I suspect this is why I was invited in the first place.

And let me tell you, the overall rankings are highly speculative. You look at a list of faculty and you might have read (maybe!) the work of 20%-30% of the people overall. But nevertheless you’re asked to come up with some number between 1 and 5 to evaluate a department.

You really have no idea how talented many of the philosophers are. Let me repeat: no idea. So when BL claims that the PGR measures the quality of faculty, this is a big stretch. Sometimes you find yourself thinking: well, at least I’ve heard of philosopher X or Y. But you most likely would not have read his or her work, and certainly not in depth. So you have little sense of whether their reputation is deserved or not.

When it comes to specialty rankings, you have more of a clue, and these I regard as more accurate. I have actually read the work of several people in the subareas for which I rank. But even here, stupid/chance things can swamp your judgment. For example, you heard Professor X present a paper at an invitation-only conference, and thought he/she sounded impressive. (But you’ve never heard Professor Y in your area, so he/she should get a lesser ranking, right? Or maybe Professor Z was stumped by a question when you heard Z speak, so he/she can’t be really bright, right?)

In this morass, Dicey Jennings’ work is a breath of fresh air. It actually relies on data to assess departments—the data that are likely of greatest possible significance to potential students, concerning placement, or whether they might actually get a job in philosophy when they graduate.

I just wanted to point out something in Leiter’s response that I find especially troubling. He says,

“If what they say and do suggests poor judgment, dishonesty, carelessness, ulterior motives, etc., I also say so.”

What constitutes such a “suggestion”? It is all too easy to transition from “x puts forward an argument/claim with which I disagree” to “x possesses numerous character flaws or is guided by ulterior motives”. Sometimes it is clear that someone is acting in bad faith or acting in a way that is an expression of some vice, intellectual or otherwise. But disagreement, in and of itself, seems like a terribly low bar to license the above inference. I’ve met many people who make this move all the time; everyone they disagree with is somehow deficient or dishonest. I leave it to you to judge whether those who readily make this move are themselves manifesting numerous vices.

I should also mention the obvious point that removing something as a courtesy is not the same as removing something because it is wrong.

I appreciate the Daily Nous for its thoughtful, measured, respectful example for open civil discussion. Carolyn Dicey Jennings is doing a great service to the profession. She shows noble openness about her methods, amazing grace about the shortcomings of her data at present, and complete willingness to work with others to make her data of maximal usefulness. I also admire Carrie Ickikawa Jenkins’ sensitive, thoughtful, and wise pledge on Facebook (also at Feminist Philosophers Blog). For what it is worth I have been a PGR reviewer for many years, maybe from the beginning, both for the general rankings and in philosophy of mind and ethics/moral psychology. I had already pledged to myself never to do so again because of the meanness, bullying, and sanctimonious protectiveness. Perhaps other senior people who review for PGR will rethink doing so as well.

I wish BL would stop copying me. One time, in an anonymous comment on a philosophy blog, I used the same idiom about the road to hell being paved with good intentions to describe BLeiter himself! Oh well.

So let’s depose Leiter because he is ill tempered sometimes. It’s not as if there aren’t legions of people eager to get into his shoes/ Let’s put some typically apolitical, mainstream logic chopper in his place. That will make it all better. We’ll truly get an appreciation of how power relations work from someone who, unlike Leiter, has never read a page of Nietzsche or Foucault. It’s not as if those ‘smart’ ultra analytic types are the ones responsible for 97.2% of problems in professional philosophy, anyway.

Leiter may lack civility, but his views are a breath of fresh air and ensure a modicum of pluralism. If it weren’t for him we’d all be counting the number of holes in our donuts.