With which universities have APA Presidents been affiliated?
Joshua Paschal, a recent philosophy PhD out of Indiana University Bloomington, took up that question, gathered the data, and discusses it in the guest post, below.
It’s a look at one kind of the institutional history of philosophy in the United States, one that may inform or complement our understanding of the sociology of the profession.
A History of U.S. Philosophy Via APA Presidencies
by Joshua Paschal
The presidency of the American Philosophical Association (APA) is a glimpse into the history of academic philosophy in North America. While only a partial picture, we can get some valuable insight into the history and tendencies of our discipline, as well as find some interesting outliers along the way. The dataset still has a few gaps, but any observable trends should hold regardless of those missing tokens.
Before the longer write-up with commentary below, here are some standout stats:
- Only 53 Ph.D.-granting institution’s graduates have ever served as a divisional President of the APA, with 22 only represented once.
- Harvard is dominant in terms of Ph.D.-granting institutions, accounting for 72 Presidential terms (with 1 two-termer, Blanshard), with the “2nd tier” appearing much later: Cornell (25), Columbia (24), and Princeton (23).
- Harvard is also first for all divisions individually: 29 (Eastern), 13 (Western/Central), and 16 (Pacific).
- This also holds post-1980, with Harvard at 26 and Princeton at a sole 2nd tier at 19.
- Yale is 7th in terms of Ph.D.-granting institutions but, barring any unfortunate data gaps, has not been represented since Benhabib in 2006-7.
- International institutions are present fairly consistently for Ph.D.-granting institutions, most notably Oxford (8) and Freiburg (5)
- The German-speaking institutions were mostly represented before 1980, perhaps most notably with Marcuse (1968-69), the most recent Freiburg-associated President.
- Since 1980 for Ph.D.-granting institutions: Oxford (6), Toronto (4), KU Leuven (1), and Paris (1).
- The University of Michigan is where the plurality of Presidents started their careers post-Ph.D. (13), followed closely behind by Columbia (11), Harvard (10), and a tie between Cornell (9) and UC Berkeley (9).
- APA Presidents have started their careers at 111 distinct institutions, and 65 since 1980.
- In terms of institutions while serving as President, 89 distinct institutions appear in the data
- UC Berkeley is first (20), followed closely by Harvard (19), Chicago (17), Michigan (15), Princeton (14), and a few others.
- The on-offs are interesting here and include CCNY, Scripps, Manitoba, Grinnell, just as some examples of APA Presidents serving from outside the typical elite.
- Only Columbia has had active faculty members who have served as Presidents of every division (something I am attempting to verify and find an explanation for).
- APA Presidents tend to end their careers at more prestigious, legacy institutions: Berkeley (20), Harvard (19), Chicago (15), Michigan (14), and a three-way tie between Columbia, UCLA, and Yale (13).
- APA Presidents have ended their careers (or are currently at) 95 distinct institutions, minimally, which is actually a greater diversity than their affiliations during their terms. (I suspect this is due to endowed chairships used to recruit “big names”).
- There is significant deviation from the patterns outlined here and the PGR’s ranking of the Ph.D. granting institutions, discussed in a comparison toward the end of this post.
Here is a table listing the presidents of the different divisions of the APA and their precursors.
The Early Period to the Post-War Period
Before 1920, there were the Western Philosophical Association and the American Philosophical Association, with inaugural Presidents Frank Thilly (Western, 1900-2) and James Edwin Creighton (American, 1901-2). Interestingly, both were Cornell faculty members, though Thilly was at the University of Missouri during his term. Interestingly, Thilly even wrote a Philosophical Review article about Creighton, evidence of ties between the two organizations.
That early period before the post-1920 divisional structure featured an interesting blend of institutional affiliations. Of their Ph.D.-granting institutions for the Western Presidents of that period: Cornell, Yale, Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard, and Columbia feature among the American institutions, as well as Berlin twice (Woodbridge and Sharp) and Freiburg (Tufts). A number of gaps persist in the data in the very early 20th century, sadly, so it is hard to extrapolate much more about trends beyond one.
Many of these early Presidents were connected through the University of Chicago, in part due to the influence of John Dewey’s move there in 1884. Of the American Presidents, so titled, a similar blend can be seen regarding Ph.D.-granting institutions: Johns Hopkins features twice through Josiah Royce and John Dewey, as well as Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia, and once again some German institutions: this time Freiburg and Leipzig (Münsterberg).
Mary Whiton Calkins (American President, 1918-1919) is an interesting exception to the norms of that time: she was the first woman to be President of both the American Philosophical Association and American Psychological Association as a professor as Wellesley College, even after Harvard administration had blocked her from her formal Ph.D. (Harvard webpage on this, for those curious).
The modern structure of the APA divisions came about in the 1920s, with the Eastern being named from the American at-large in 1920 and the Pacific being founded in 1924. In this period, Harvard and company’s dominance is striking. 6 of the 10 Eastern Presidents in the 1920s were Harvard graduates! The other divisions’ data is currently lacking for this period, but from 1931-1950 at least 7 Pacific Presidents were also Harvard graduates.
Putting aside alma maters, there was some interesting institutional diversity in this early period.
In the Eastern Division, the Ivies are well-represented up to the 1950s: Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia, Penn, and Princeton. Amherst, the City College of New York, Boston, Ohio State, and Swarthmore also make early appearances.
In the Western Division (Central, pre-1984), the data is spotty, but regional flagships dominate: Chicago, Michigan, Wisconsin-Madison, Iowa, Kansas, UIUC, Nebraska-Lincoln, and Minnesota all make early appearances as affiliations during the presidents’ terms.
In the Pacific, a few schools jump out from the early 20th century (since 1924) in terms of faculty affiliations. UC Berkeley dominated early on, with 10 different presidents alone before 1952. Stanford, Oregon, Nebraska, USC, Washington, and UCLA also all make early appearances. Pacific schools, however, are notably absent from the Ph.D.-granting column: most of the early Pacific Presidents were Harvard Ph.D.s, perhaps surprisingly.
Post-War to the Late 20th Century
The most interesting trends in this period grew from the impact of the Second World War and the wave of immigrants who came to the United States in this period. A handful of Presidents held Ph.D.s from German-speaking institutions in this time: Reichenbach (Pacific 1947, Erlangen), Hempel (Eastern 1961, Berlin), Feigl (Central 1962, Vienna), Bergmann (Central 1967, Vienna), and Marcuse (Pacific 1968, Freiburg). This clearly parallels the influence of both logical positivism and critical theory in this period.
Unless there’s a missing data point, this group would be the last Central European degree-holding Presidents outside of McMullin (Central 1983, KU Leuven).
Outside of this, Harvard’s dominance is striking, especially in the Eastern Division, accounting for the Ph.D. institutions of around 1 in 4 Presidents, including a four-year run from 1965 to 1969, a trend that would reemerge in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And many of those who held other Ph.D.s were faculty at Harvard during their terms, such as Rawls, Cavell, and Nozick.
In the Western/Central, the degree institutions are more mixed, but there is a clear trend of University of Michigan faculty members in this time: Stevenson (1961), Frankena (1965), Brandt (1969), Burks (1972), Curley (1990), Sklar (2000), Gibbard (2001), and Darwall (2003). The University of Wisconsin at Madison also features prominently as faculty institutions: Dretske (1984), Singer (1985, Marcus, not Peter), and Sober (1998), and has reemerged in recent years with Atherton (2012), Nadler (2013), Shafer-Landau (2020), and Brighouse (2025).
In the Pacific, there is similar preference to the prestige institutions of the East Coast regarding degree-granting institutions, with some exceptions. UCLA features thrice in 5 years alone: Fingarette (1976), Salmon (1977), and Kaplan (1980). But the Pacific Division overwhelmingly supports UC-system faculty members, accounting for around half of all Pacific Presidents since the mid-20th century.
Since 1980 and Comparison to the Philosophical Gourmet Report
What’s most surprising is how diverse the institutions of affiliation have become in recent years, both in terms of degree-granting institutions and work affiliation. It has become incredibly rare for any form of affiliation to repeat in nearby years across divisions, which readers are welcome to go view for themselves in lieu of overly long lists here. But since 1980 alone, APA Presidents have started their careers at 65 different institutions, served from 61 distinct institutions, and ended their careers or currently work at 60 unique institutions, all of which are greater diversity than their degree-granting institutions.
The most striking difference (which, while not marked directly in the data, I have estimated separately) is the gender gap. Before 1980, less than 5% of APA divisional Presidents were women—since 1980, around 1 in3, assuming my cursory assessment of the data is correct, have identified as women. Perhaps more recent comparisons would yield different results.
Outside of that, it is also interesting how different the picture this data sketches compares to another common touchstone of our discipline: the Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR). While the PGR is controversial, it is, like the APA presidency data, a similar screenshot into the sociology of philosophical academia.
Some observations:
- Harvard (PGR #10) dominates overall appearances at 84 unique appearances in the data.
- The “Second Tier” for overall appearances in the data also capture a wide range of PGR ranks
- Top 10 and high-appearing: Princeton (#3, 38 counted), Berkeley (#6, 35 counted), Michigan (#4, 33 counted), Yale (#4, 27 counted), UCLA (#10, 24), and Pitt (#8, 16 counted).
- Under the top ten appearing equally high: Columbia (#21, 38 counted), Cornell (#16, 35 counted), Chicago (#16, 33 counted), Stanford (#14, 23 counted), Wisconsin-Madison (#24, 15 counted), Brown (#23, 12 counted), Minnesota (#43, 12 counted), Johns Hopkins ($16, 11 counted), Ohio State (#25, 10 counted), and UIUC (#49, 10 counted)
- These lists together exhaust the number of schools that appear 10 or more times in the overall data with redundancies corrected for.
- Some of the top schools appear striking low in the data
- NYU appears only 7 times and has never had a doctoral alumni serve as a divisional president: all have been faculty members (Likely a testament to their relatively recent rise to their position in the last couple of decades of the 20th Century, as Justin noted to me in preparing this post).
- Likewise with Rutgers (PGR #2), except they appear only 5 times (But they were only founded as a unified department in 1982!)
- USC (PGR #6) also appears only 5 times, though one alumni is counted for them in the data.
- UT-Austin is also down here, appearing 8 times in the data (Above NYU and Rutgers)
- Only two schools fail to appear in this data that are listed in the PGR: UConn (PGR #35) and Miami (PGR #39)
- This suggests, contrary to the internal variance, significant overlap of the underlying social environment this data tracks.
- Major public flagships tend to appear equally low in both sets of data, such as Indiana, Colorado (Boulder), Maryland, Virginia, and Utah.
Overall, this data reflect what I take to be a common consensus: both that traditionally dominant institutions within the discipline generally remain in that elite position, yet there has been noticeable diversification over time. I will cut off my discussion of this data there. It has been an interesting project for me and I welcome comments.
