Lots of morning after writings on the RAE results. Here are some of the headlines.

• In the Guardian, “Jonathan Wolff”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/dec/18/higher-education-rae-tables-jonathan-wolff has a nice before and after column on the results. (And he deserves congratulations for UCL’s outstanding results.)
• The comments thread at “Brian Leiter’s Blog”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/12/2008-research-a.html has lots of interesting discussion. I liked Andrew McGonigal’s “summary of my summary”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/12/2008-research-a.html#comment-143049302 of the results.
• Robbie Williams has a “detailed discussion”:http://theoriesnthings.wordpress.com/2008/12/19/uk-philosophy-rankings-rae-gourmet-etc/ of the results, looking in particular at which way of parsing the rankings matches most closely with Leiter’s rankings.
• One other point Robbie makes is important. “[W]ho every thought that there’s a linear ordering to capture in the first place?” As someone who has made a career out of arguing that probabilities aren’t linearly ordered (as many people agree), and that truth values aren’t linearly ordered either (which everyone thinks is crazy), I should agree. Philosophers are much too quick to assume that a comparative induces a linear ranking in general, and this case is no exception. But of course both probabilities and truth values, although they don’t induce linear orderings, do have top values. So while you shouldn’t take any of these tables too seriously, you should remember that St Andrews is at the top.
• Slightly more seriously, I do think The One True RAE Ranking of Philosophy Programs does tell us something important. If you focus on averages, UCL is overall best I think, followed closely by St Andrews, then Kings, then it gets a little messy. (I know St Andrews is tied with UCL on GPA, but I’d prefer their profile to ours.) If you focus on total quality, obviously Oxford is first, then Cambridge HPS, then it gets messy, with Kings, Leeds, St Andrews and Sheffield in the mix. I think there’s something to be said for taking both perspectives, the averages and totals, seriously. And if you do that, it’s easy to see St Andrews as doing particularly well, because it is in the mix in both categories. I do think the One True Ranking understates how well some departments (esp UCL) did, but I think it’s worth noting the overall judgment of the RAE panel that St Andrews (like Kings) maintained a spectacular batting average while being a large-ish department.
• In non-philosophy news, “John Gardner”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lawf0081/rae.htm produced a similar series of tables for law. In law it seemed the judgments were easier. LSE was best on averages, Oxford was best once you factored in size. And the Borda count method had them, happily, coming out exactly tied.