We're Number One!

I'm still working on a longer write-up of my trip to Michigan and my plans for the next few years, but I just learned something interesting I thought I'd share:

When I made my decisions about which schools to apply to both last year and the year before, I used what I knew as the only ranking system for philosophy programs, the Philosophical Gourmet Report. That system is based on taking a description of the programs and showing it to a bunch of philosophy professors (from different schools) and having them rank the programs. Using that system, here are the top ten:

1. New York University
2. Rutgers
3. Princeton University
3. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
5. University of Pittsburgh
6. Stanford University
7. Harvard University
7. MIT
7. UCLA
10. Columbia University
10. Univ. of North Carolina –Chapel Hill

(there are some ties, as you can see.)

Interestingly enough, I've now learned that there is another, newer system for ranking programs, called the Faculty Scholar Productivity Index. This system uses a web crawler to find how often faculty and grad students in the program are published in journals, or write books, or are cited by other scholars, or receive awards/grants/etc. According to that scale, the top ten are:

1. Michigan State University
2. CUNY Graduate School
2. Princeton University
4. University of Virginia
5. Rutgers
6. University of California – San Diego
7. Pennsylvania State University
8. The University of Texas at Austin
9. SUNY at Stony Brook
10. Rice University

So what do we see here? Well first of all, MSU is the top school in the country. No, really! That will really help when it comes time for me to apply for jobs, especially if this ratings system becomes more widely known and respected. The other thing we notice is that they're quite different. So which is better? Well, considering that, as the philosophy blog Gone Public points out,

there is no one on the list [of philosophy professors who review and rank every school's programs] from Michigan State, Penn State, or Stony Brook: and only one each from Rice, and CUNY — and none of these schools show up in his top ten even though they do show up in FSPI’s top ten. But four of Leiter’s responders are with NYU; nine have been affiliated with Stanford; thirteen with Michigan; twenty-two with Pittsburgh; and another twenty-some with Harvard — and all of these schools show up in his top ten.

Suspicious to say the least. Add that to the fact that the Gourmet Report short-changes schools that are strong in areas like social justice, feminism, and other things that a certain kind of philosopher looks down on, and I'm even more pleased where MSU appears, on both lists.