I was a little harsh on Notre Dame in the first post here, wasn’t I? To put this in some kind of perspective, here’s another junky M&E ranking that I pulled together from the last report. It’s an average of the mean and median scores in metaphysics and epistemology for departments for which all four of those scores were reported. (They weren’t reported, for e.g. MIT in epistemology or Berkeley in metaphysics.)
1. Rutgers
2. Oxford
3. NYU
4. ND
5. Princeton
6. Pitt
6. Brown
7. St. A
8. ANU
9. Arizona
9. U-Mass
10. Cornell
11. Texas
11. UNC
12. Cambridge
13. UCLA
14. Wisconsin
15. Michigan
That makes ND’s fourth place in Leiter’s new rank look a little more plausible than I was suggesting. (On the other hand, it does back up my thought that U-Mass was ranked much too low.) Obviously there have been a lot of changes in the 2 years since, and this isn’t a particularly meaningful measure even of how things were 2 years ago. But I’d say that in cases where my list and Leiter’s radically differ, you should take both with a boulder of salt.