By Sam Duncan
The thing I object to most strongly in rankings is that I think they all have value judgments baked in and that by using them one is accepting those judgments without thinking about or taking responsibility for a value judgment. Now I won’t lie, I find the values baked into the PGR especially bad ones, but I sincerely believe that this is a problem inherent in any attempt to rank graduate programs in philosophy or education more generally. Consider the way that judgments about what is good philosophy are hidden in the PGR’s supposedly objective and factual ranking.
The way that specialty rankings are listed and what specialty rankings are listed is especially revealing. Metaethics and moral psychology get their own slot in the “Value Theory” heading and so does philosophy of law. But bioethics, digital ethics, business ethics, and environmental ethics are all rolled into one big ball and listed as “Applied Ethics.” It could be worse for them though. Feminism isn’t even judged to be “Value Theory” but is instead relegated to “Other.” Kant gets an entire slot to himself under “History” while Chinese philosophy and Indian philosophy are also crammed into the “Other” drawer. Indian philosophy doesn’t even get its own proper category in “Other.” Islamic philosophy isn’t listed anywhere. I don’t think anyone could accuse me of lacking sufficient respect for Kant, but that he gets a slot all his own while Zhuangzi, Confucius, Mengzi, and Lao Tzu are all stuffed into a single category that isn’t even counted as proper history of philosophy is indefensible. That the PGR tacitly says that al-Ghazali and ibn-Rushd aren’t even philosophers is so off base I’m literally at a loss for words.
What message does this send to a potential graduate student interested in say Zhuangzi or al-Ghazali? Pretty obviously that what they are interested in is less valuable than Kant or even isn’t real philosophy. These issues become even worse when one thinks about the general rankings and not just the specialties. There is a widespread perception that hires in the so-called “core” areas are more important for the PGR ranking. This too sends a message to graduate students about what is and isn’t good philosophy.
What is much worse is that administrators, especially at the sorts of institutions that tend to have PhD programs care very much about rankings like the PGR. Who then would have an advantage at a school that wants to move up the rankings, a brilliant bioethicist doing groundbreaking work on resource allocation or a clever and well-pedigreed, but ultimately unexceptional, LEMMing? I think we can already guess how a specialist in Islamic or Chinese philosophy does in this competition.
This is bad on a few levels. For one thing, there are a decent number of jobs in fields like digital ethics, environmental ethics, and feminism these days, and, at the moment relatively few new PhDs in those fields. Any school that really cared about placing its graduates could almost certainly do a good job at that by developing strength in those areas, and unlike moving up to the top 20 of the PGR from an unranked position or even scoring a spot on one of the LEMM subrankings it’s doable on a fairly modest budget. But that would not move the school up the PGR rankings. Administrators and faculty who care about that would oppose this move even though it would be very good for their future graduate students. I’ll add that this is not a hypothetical worry as I personally know of at least one PhD program that more or less trashed a very good applied ethics program with an excellent placement record in an attempt to make it into the PGR rankings.
All of this is just bad for academic philosophy not just as a field of intellectual inquiry but as a financially viable program. Bioethics classes tend to be in demand at most colleges and that is even more true of classes in the ethics of technology/AI and environmental ethics. If philosophy programs don’t hire people who can teach these classes they are leaving money on the table. Consider too that the number of college students is projected to shrink– perhaps quite dramatically– while at the same time that the students who do go to college are projected to become ever more diverse in terms of race and religion. We are reaching a point where we quite literally cannot afford prejudices of the sort that dismiss Islamic philosophy as not real philosophy and shove off Chinese philosophy into a “miscellaneous” category.
I know what the reply here will be: Administrators and faculty who use the PGR in this way are misusing it. I honestly can’t take this reply seriously and quite honestly have a hard time even seeing it as being offered in good faith. For one thing, it seems to be the most common blanket reply when anyone points out a potential way that the PGR could harm would-be graduate students or the profession as a whole. Worse, it’s exactly the same sort of reply that the NRA, casinos, or the alcohol industry give when anyone points out that their products do harm. “Hey we put labels on every single bottle of Thundertrain telling folks to drink responsibly. Not only that those labels specifically say not to drink and drive or drink while pregnant. It’s not our fault if people don’t use our product responsibly!” And as with alcohol and gambling it is very much in the interests of those who create rankings or do the ranking if their products are “misused” in this way. Problem drinkers account for most sales of alcohol and the most profitable group for casinos are always those with gambling problems. In the same way rankings have much more cache if faculty and administrators are using them to make hiring decisions or decisions about the entire direction of programs than they do if individual graduate students are using them to make decisions about picking programs.
Now I think the APDA is far preferable to the PGR in that it doesn’t hide value judgments in quite the same way (though as I said in the last post using it as a ranking would lead potential graduate students to make value judgments carelessly). And unlike ranking for perceived prestige, ranking programs for placement would incentivize decisions about hiring and department direction by administrators and faculty that would be positive for both potential graduate students and the profession as a whole. However, even using the APDA as a ranking would inevitably lead to abuses. This is a point that I think deserves a separate post.
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