It would be so fun to do a full-scale, Baseball Prospectus style transaction analysis on all the moves Brian Leiter reports. But I might not get invited to certain parties any more if I call it as I see it, and just saying “This department got better with its hires” all down the board would be a waste of bandwidth. So I’ll mostly do some commentary on Leiter’s own commentary and end with what I think is an interesting policy question. (I’ve moved this to the extended files because it’s (a) long and (b) inside baseball and (c) even more self-indulgent than you’d guess from it being a blog post satisfying (a) and (b).)

Elliot Sober is a big loss to Wisconsin, and a big gain for Stanford, but it’s hard to overestimate the quality of the junior hires Wisconsin have been making recently, so within a few years we might think they haven’t done too badly all things considered.

No disrespect intended to Stanford, or to Sober, but I’m not convinced at all that his hire moves them into parity with Michigan. I still think (not very originally) that Michigan is in 4th place, a bit of a way behind the front 3, but still closer to 3rd than 5th. If the rankings race was a cycling race, Michigan would be getting very tired being out on their own for so long.

Brian Leiter thinks the move brings Stanford not just to the front of the chasing pack, but up alongside Michigan, so take my opinions with a larger than usual grain of salt.

I can’t tell whether my disagreement with Brian here is because he has a higher opinion of Stanford than I, or whether he has a lower opinion of Michigan than I. My first thought was that it is probably some of each. My second thought was that the question may not make sense. I now think whether the question makes sense is probably more interesting than its answer.

I still think Rutgers is the best department in raw faculty quality, though Michael Smith moving to Princeton might move them to first (above MIT) in my list of where I would recommend a top student go to. (Why the difference between faculty quality judgement and recommendation? Because I think the probability of getting a good job this decade is a really important factor in choosing a grad school, one that outweighs relatively small differences in faculty quality.)

Losing Michael Smith is a disaster for ANU, and for Australian philosophy generally. Until and unless other departments start to get a reputation like ANU’s, and attract anything like the quality and quantity of international visitors it does, my impression is that what’s good for ANU is what’s good for Australian philosophy, so this loss stings a bit.

On the brighter side, or at least the less gloomy side, ANU has been doing a great job recently, especially at identifying top philosophers to bring back to Australia, so hopefully they can make a splash with Michael’s and Philip’s replacements. Having two jobs open (more or less) at once should give them a bit of flexibility, so there’s reason for confidence that they’ll make another smart move (or two). Still, given how much they’ve lost recently it’s going to be loss minimisation rather than department strengthening, even if they play it well.

I hadn’t noticed Robert Audi is moving from Nebraska to Notre Dame. That’s bad news for the Huskers, but I think it’s a smart pickup for the Irish. Were there any other moves where the overall football quality of the before and after schools was as high?

CUNY has made lots of good hires, but I’m not sure I’d move them into the top 15 until I see how the new department will work, and especially how its placement record will look. (Here’s this year’s record, for comparison. They also have some good advice for job seekers, which is worth looking at if you’re, per chance, a job seeker.) This is probably horribly unfair, but CUNY after the recent hires reminds me of some recent Mets teams. I just can’t tell which recent Mets teams. Lots of high profile hires, all of them with stellar records, not all of them known to still be performing at the level of their (very high) peaks. That could be the NL Champion Mets of 2000, or the 97-win Mets of 1999. But it also could be the last place Mets of the last two years. I really hope it’s the former, because I like the people I know at CUNY, and the upside for that department in the next few years is sky high, and I think more great NY departments is a good thing. But I’d be more confident if their rebuilding plan included more young people, and fewer stars. (By the way, if anyone at CUNY is reading this, something’s gone very wrong with the Aurora site – none of the menu buttons seem to work in either Mozilla or IE on my PC.)

Let’s end with a policy question – one that relates to NYU’s hires. Brian Leiter thinks this makes the department much more well rounded, and this is a very important consideration in moving them (near) to the top of the pops. I think they’ve hired some excellent philosophers, but it doesn’t make that much difference to their overall status. That’s because I think that how good you are at your best area is more important than how broad you are.

(This will be the last baseball analogy for the post, I promise, but there’s an analogy to evaluating baseball players here. When working on lists of who’s the best all time, some people prefer to focus on how good a player was across the length of his career, because that’s the total contribution made, others focus on the value at their best, because that makes such a big difference towards winning titles. Someone who values across the career value highly might think Hank Aaron ranks above Mickey Mantle, someone who prefers peak value might prefer the reverse. Switch years for areas of philosophy and you have the analogy.)

Why do I think how good you are at what you do best matters more than how good you do across the board? Because I think the things we value faculty quality for make a bigger difference in the area a department is strongest in than in areas it is trying to cover gaps in.

I think the three most important things a department does are (in chronological order) undergraduate teaching, graduate teaching and scholarly interaction.

At risk of being branded ‘strange’, I doubt faculty quality has much to with quality of undergraduate teaching. Having said that, to the extent faculty quality does matter there’s some reason here for liking breadth in a department, since a philosophy department has a duty to offer a wide range of undergraduate courses. But this doesn’t mean you need experts in every field – I think it means that when looking for people who help in other areas you prioritise people can teach the areas you’re weak in. So I think there’s some reason to prefer breadth because it helps with undergrad teaching, but breadth of undergrad teaching ability is only loosely correlated with breadth of research strength.

Faculty quality does have a lot to do with quality of grad teaching. But here I don’t think breadth really matters a lot. Let’s assume we’ve got a department that’s very strong in political philosophy, and generally pretty good in normative ethics (it’s hard to have the first without the second I think), but weak in other areas. If they hire a top philosopher of language, that will certainly improve their graduate teaching in philosophy of language. But it’s not clear how much this will matter to the students, unless students who are going to a political philosophy school care to brush up on philosophy of language I guess.

I think that grad students come to a department for what the department is good in, and what matters for graduate teaching is the quality of teaching you can supply to meet the demand.

This doesn’t mean departments should focus on just one narrowly defined thing. (“Our departmental strength is type-B responses to the knowledge argument for dualism,” isn’t a selling point.)

For one thing to know an area well you have to know a little bit about the surrounding areas, so my ideal department would include a spread around a core area. (Complication: in every area of philosophy I can think of, half the ‘surrounding areas’ are not in philosophy. Does this mean we should hire non-philosophers to cover those areas? Suddenly syntacticians and historians and neurologists and sociologists would be getting hired in philosophy. That doesn’t seem right.) A well trained grad student working in area X usually needs to know about areas Y, Z and W as well. But these days there’s no reason to think that covers all of philosophy. Does one need to know much epistemology to be a top metaphysician, or much philosophy of language to do first rate work on perception? I rather doubt it, and these are normally taken to be pretty closely related fields in philosophy.

For another, grad students drift in their interests over the course of a degree. This is I think the best reason for having a broad based department. But it isn’t that good a reason. Students on the whole don’t drift too far in their interests in the course of their studies. Also, any serious drift in interest will just as often be to outside philosophy, so we can’t cover all drift there is. I’m tempted to say this is a reason to be good at everything, but it just doesn’t look that strong to me.

Finally, there’s scholarly interaction. Here I think breadth has very few virtues as compared to depth in a particular area. Sometimes it’s nice to have colleagues working on everything under the sun, particularly if you’re like me: a gadfly who tries to do a bit of everything. But my impression is the most productive interactions (by far) occur between colleagues working on pretty closely related subject matters. So this seems to me to be a strong argument for preferring expertise in an area to decent coverage of all areas.

So I think having broad coverage instead of excellence in one area (assuming of course this is the choice, which it sometimes is) helps a little in undergrad teaching, probably weakens grad teaching relative to what the students want/need, though at some risk of providing poor coverage for students who radically change direction, and is a much worse option in terms of promoting scholarly interaction. All things considered, I’d prefer strengthening strengths than broadening the base. Of course, this is assuming the base is decent enough to start with, and that this is the only relevant trade-off, and ceteris is in every other way paribus. For all I know about what was available, hiring the very very good philosophers they hired was the best move open to NYU. But these reasons are why I’m (a little) less excited about the hires than others may be.

(Just to be clear this isn’t about the areas NYU is actually hiring in, I’d apply the same analysis to Brown with very different conclusions. The areas we’re weak in are basically my areas, logic and language. (We’re non-existent in philosophy of science, but that’s such a big omission that even I think it needs to be coverred.) But although we’re not strong in logic and language, we’re good enough – I’m good enough to teach decent grad classes even if I’m not going to be a grad student magnet. Hiring someone else in these areas would make me very happy, but would do less for Brown than an equivalent quality hire in mind or epistemology, the areas that (most of) our current grad students are focussed on, or in ancient or political, the areas that the university (including people in and out of philosophy) is building significant strengths in.)