What do you think about Lieter and his blogs/ranking system?

[Moose#@1%$]

So, Bryan Lieter is in the philosophy talks again for being a bully. He's apparently blogging about some grad students now. So, I was wondering what do people think about his blog and his ranking?

Apparently Bryan has been accused of bullying grad students and junior faculty online. One professor, Sandra Lapointe, even said that she criticized Leiter online about something and that led Bryan calling her chair (why?) to point it out to them. Luckily for her her chair was cool didn't pay much attention to Leiter. But her point was that Leiter has been known for calling Grad students department and complaining about their "behavior." If that's true then that's pretty petty and messed up.

Anyway, I thought this could be something interesting to talk about see what others thing about Leiter and his websites etc. Also, something for us to do while we wait. lol

Disclaimer: I do not have any personal experience with Leiter, so, if some one knows something I've said is inaccurate or details about the incidences then do share.

[practically_mi]

I really appreciate the PGR and have found it immensely useful but Leiter himself is a massive bully. He seems to enjoy harassing grad students and junior scholars both on Twitter and on his blog... regardless of the substantive disagreements someone with his amount of power really should refrain from behaving like that

[Moose#@1%$]

12 minutes ago, practically_mi said:

I really appreciate the PGR and have found it immensely useful but Leiter himself is a massive bully. He seems to enjoy harassing grad students and junior scholars both on Twitter and on his blog... regardless of the substantive disagreements someone with his amount of power really should refrain from behaving like that

I don't even know about his ranking system. I think it's biased and many schools are not ranked because they aren't even part of the choice. It is helpful but I'm not sure how accurate or helpful for the field it is.

[Prose]

PGR is useful. not perfect, not terrible, useful.

Leiter-related gossip is useless.

[Duns Eith]

The best we got, but it sucks

[Kantattheairport]

The PGR has been pretty useful for me as a starting point for research when applying, so I'm grateful for that. At the same time, I also find the arguments that in the long run, having a prestige-based ranking system as a point of departure like this harms the development of the discipline fairly convincing. So... I dunno, I suppose I don't have a settled opinion on it!

Leiter himself, I don't think I would like as a person (though I've been meaning to read some of his academic work for a while). I've for the most part given up reading the philosophy bits of his blog (some of the other links he posts I still find useful). Though I've also given up reading Daily Nous, so it might just be the current shambolic state of online academic philosophy (apart from the group at TheGradCafe <3).

Edited January 28, 2019 by Kantattheairport

[Marcus_Aurelius]

Yeah, I echo what others have said: Leiter is often an awful guy, but PGR is useful, albeit flawed. PGR was especially useful for me as an ancient specialist, and I freely admit that I just went down the list and applied to all the programs rated highly for Ancient in the last PGR.

[Moose#@1%$]

18 hours ago, Prose said:

PGR is useful. not perfect, not terrible, useful.

Leiter-related gossip is useless.

I'm not even sure how useful it is.. honestly. It seems nothing more than a popularity contest by people who are already "popular." But, I also don't think Leiter related problems or gossip is useless. He's a well known person in the field and if he's bullying people and other professors who disagree with him, then that's a problem. He has a popular blog where he can easily go and bad mouth people and if that's true then that needs some sort of repercussions. Also, if true, then we as a community shouldn't pay this much attention to him.

[Prose]

33 minutes ago, Moose#@1%$ said:

I'm not even sure how useful it is.. honestly. It seems nothing more than a popularity contest by people who are already "popular." But, I also don't think Leiter related problems or gossip is useless. He's a well known person in the field and if he's bullying people and other professors who disagree with him, then that's a problem. He has a popular blog where he can easily go and bad mouth people and if that's true then that needs some sort of repercussions. Also, if true, then we as a community shouldn't pay this much attention to him.

"nothing more than a popularity contest" >>> good luck defending this

in spirit of the above, I SHALL REVISE  my diction >>>  largely useless 

"we as a community" >>> legit no one cares what we think

[Moose#@1%$]

1 hour ago, Prose said:

"nothing more than a popularity contest" >>> good luck defending this

in spirit of the above, I SHALL REVISE  my diction >>>  largely useless 

"we as a community" >>> legit no one cares what we think

Okay, well maybe not completely a popularity contest but PGR has been criticized for being just that by many other people, popular faculty included.

I also think people will care what we think, if future and current grad students start to visit PGR website less or use it less. It is us grad students who use it primarily and then Bryan starts attacking other grad students for criticizing him. Besides we can't as philosophers just live with a complacent attitude and we should address problems when a senior member of the field is petty enough to go after grad students and bad mouth them. He knows that it could hurt their job prospects (given the popularity of his blog). I don't know I'm just a bit cynical of arbitrary ranking systems and then when the person behind them turns out to be thin-skinned bully.

But it seems I'm in the minority here haha. So, maybe I'm wrong about PGR and Bryan Lieter.

[The_Last_Thylacine]

From my understanding, what motivates the use of the PGR is that many academic philosophers believe there is something helpful about the way the programs are evaluated. So, the way in which the PGR will most likely affect your life regards the kinds of job interviews you will receive, and the kinds of jobs you will ultimately get. Because there is a large enough contingent of philosophers who think the PGR is a useful way of judging the propensity of an individual to be a good philosopher, and these same people are likely to be on hiring committees, it is good to pay attention to the rankings for these reasons. For example, Arizona has done a particularly good job of advertising their strengths in social and political philosophy (and the PGR is evidence of their specialty in this area), and they are able to secure a lot of jobs for their graduates based on this reputation.

Edited January 28, 2019 by The_Last_Thylacine

[Jespersen]

I agree with what others have said about the usefulness of PGR. Granted, PGR reflects how a rather small group of philosophers views departments that practice English-language philosophy. However, that group of philosophers is pretty representative, or slightly more disturbingly, authoritative, of the English-speaking philosophical community at large. PGR is useful in the sense that it makes this representative view (RV) available for anyone's reference. Of course, you might think that RV is biased against certain departments, etc. But that is hardly the fault of PGR, which (presumably) merely reports RV.

As for Leiter himself, well, it's not really a question that's appropriate for discussion on an online forum.

Edited January 31, 2019 by Jespersen

[WillisBell]

On the job market, I tend to think appearance is going to be a large part of it.  The truth is that being at a top PGR program is a good look, regardless of whether it matches up with actual quality or not.  I looked for good faculty at Leiter-ific schools, I didn't let the ratings control my entire decision-making but I let it place limits on it.

[Rose-Colored Beetle]

My program is Leiter-unranked ("receiving votes" in epistemology, medieval, and phil of religion). Over the last 10 years, we haven't gone a year without placing people in tenure, tenure-track, or postdoc positions (roughly 3 per year). However, none of those placements were to schools on the ranking.

This is anecdotal, but it seems to reflect a general trend: the PGR is a strong predictor of placement into PhD-granting programs and placement into PGR-ranked programs, and a weak but not hamstrung predictor of placement per se. This agrees with APA research on placement, which (if memory serves) found that Baylor, of all places, has the highest percent placement into full-time positions. (One significant weakness of the APA study is that they didn't consider postdocs full-time positions even if the postdoc later went on to full-time employment later.)

When it comes to getting a job, there are so many other factors than school prestige: strength of your school's brand in a particular location, the nature of your research, the quality of your teaching record. Someone from a #20 school could easily outclass an MIT grad for an R2 position, for instance. Still, school prestige does obviously play some role, even a leading role. Whether that's due to inappropriate bias or the simple fact that prestigious schools produce better philosophers is at least up for debate, in my view.

Of course, this doesn't overturn the obvious general truth that higher-ranked PGR schools give you a better chance of having a career in research.

[trolleyproblem]

Here's some data comparing Phil. Gourmet Rankings to job placement. https://www.aerodatalab.org/philosophy-graduate-placement 

While there's correlation between PGR ranking and job placement, some programs like UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, Virginia, and others seem to beat NYU and Oxford in terms of placement.

[kakaz]

It is definitely more useful for those doing analytic phil., it's infamous among us in the continental crowd (and to be honest, members of the PGR advisory board probably would say continental philosophy isn't useful philosophy).

[CogSciRob]

On 1/27/2019 at 3:27 PM, Moose#@1%$ said:

So, Bryan Lieter is in the philosophy talks again for being a bully. He's apparently blogging about some grad students now. So, I was wondering what do people think about his blog and his ranking?

Apparently Bryan has been accused of bullying grad students and junior faculty online. One professor, Sandra Lapointe, even said that she criticized Leiter online about something and that led Bryan calling her chair (why?) to point it out to them. Luckily for her her chair was cool didn't pay much attention to Leiter. But her point was that Leiter has been known for calling Grad students department and complaining about their "behavior." If that's true then that's pretty petty and messed up.

Anyway, I thought this could be something interesting to talk about see what others thing about Leiter and his websites etc. Also, something for us to do while we wait. lol

Disclaimer: I do not have any personal experience with Leiter, so, if some one knows something I've said is inaccurate or details about the incidences then do share.

I don't have any direct experience with Leiter, but I found the PGR very useful in finding programs in my AOI (phil of cog sci).  That said, I didn't only apply to the top programs blindly, but picked 6 of the top 15 that I felt were the best fit.  And I think this is where all rankings are less helpful, as fit with the program and your interests are way more important than ranking.   I got accepted to Yale and will accept it over higher ranked NYU because NYU's psychology department isn't researching what I'm interested in and doesn't have the level of collaboration I'm seeking. Thus, even though Yale's overall and AOI ranking is lower, I find the program a better fit for multiple reasons.