NOTE: This was originally published on May 8. I’ve reposted it to provide more prominence to the comments Richard Heck makes about the PGR. (I’m afraid one of the downsides of blogs is that no one reads old posts – or comments on them.)
Chris Bertram notes that the Times (of London) has produced rankings for many of the philosophy programs in Britain. (And for many other disciplines not identical with sociology.)
The rankings are hopelessly unreliable, for much the reasons Chris notes. That Edinburgh is ranked 22, with some pretty ordinary departments above it, is just absurd. Edinburgh has lost some good people recently, and I haven’t agreed with all their hiring decisions, but it’s still a very good department. If anything, St Andrews at 18 is even worse – it’s probably one of the best 17 departments in the world, but the Times doesn’t think it’s in the best 17 in Britain. I was also a little surprised to see Cambridge number 1, but maybe if one ranks philosophy of science heavily enough that makes sense.
As far as I can tell, the Times rankings have a worse fit to reality than the RAE rankings, which is pretty damning.
It’s noteworthy I think to compare these rankings to the Leiter rankings for American (and worldwide) departments. The Leiter rankings may not be perfect, but there are no howlers like Edinburgh at 22 or St Andrews at 18. (Or Brighton, which doesn’t even have a standalone philosophy department as far as I can tell, at 5.)
UPDATE: I previously had a longer paragraph here arguing that some of the evidence from recent times showed that one of the other common complaints against the Leiter report, that it is too influential in determining where students go to grad school, was misguided. But I’m a bit worried that the longer post went into too much detail about choices various students were made by way of supporting that claim, and that possibly some of the information I was relying on wasn’t public knowledge. So I’ve deleted that, and if I had revealed things that shouldn’t be public I seriously hope Google hasn’t cached it somewhere. (Or that too many people read it in the short time I had it posted.) Instead I’ll just make an assertion unbacked by evidence: I don’t think students are choosing schools based on their being one or two places higher than alternative schools in Leiter. And I think that’s a very good thing.