I’ll talk about this more in the morning, but for now I just wanted to note St Andrews’ great performance in philosophy in the “2008 Research Assessment Exercise”:http://submissions.rae.ac.uk/results/qualityProfile.aspx?id=60&type=uoa. St Andrews had the second highest percentage of their submitted work ranked in the top category, behind only University College London, and ahead of Oxford, among others.

I’ll say more about various ways of reading the data tomorrow, but one conclusion I’ll be drawing is that Leeds comes out of the project looking pretty good. That’s well deserved of course; Leeds is a great department. But it’s also nice from a St Andrews perspective to see the most prominent hirer of St Andrews grads in recent years be ranked so highly. Hopefully other departments who hire St Andrews grads in upcoming years will also do well!