The Strange Stability of UCR's Gourmet Ranking
When I arrived at U.C. Riverside in 1997, we were ranked 34th among U.S. Philosophy Ph.D. programs on in the widely-read Philosophical Gourmet Report. Now we're ranked 30th. In the intervening time, we have hovered steadily between the low 20s and the mid 30s.
Here's a full list of tenured faculty from 1997 who are no longer with the department:
(1.) Bernd Magnus (Nietzsche), retired.
Here's a full list of tenured faculty in 2009 who were not tenured members of the department in 1997:
(1.) Maudemarie Clark (Nietzsche), recruited from Colgate.
(2.) Peter Graham (epistemology), hired as Asst Prof from Stanford, later tenured.
(3.) Agnieszka Jaworska (moral psychology), recruited from Stanford.
(4.) Robin Jeshion (philosophy of language), recruited from Yale.
(5.) John Perry (philosophy of language, only part-time at UCR), recruited from Stanford
(6.) Erich Reck (history of analytic philosophy), present as Asst Prof in 1997, later tenured.
(7.) Eric Schwitzgebel (philosophy of psychology), present as Asst Prof in 1997, later tenured.
(8.) Charles Siewert (philosophy of mind), recruited from Miami.
(9.) Mark Wrathall (Continental philosophy), recruited from BYU.
Also in the intervening years we recruited Gary Watson from UC Irvine and lost him to USC. We also tenured then lost two Assistant Professors (Carl Hoefer and Genoveva Marti) and hired three Assistant Professors who have not yet stood for tenure (William Bracken, Coleen Macnamara, and Michael Nelson).
The tenured professors of 1997 (Carl Cranor, John Fischer, David Glidden, Paul Hoffman, Pierre Keller, Andrews Reath, Georgia Warnke, Howie Wettstein, Larry Wright) have continued to be productive. One measure of this is that all but one of them have produced at least one new book from a leading press in the period (if we count Hoffman's forthcoming book and Wright's influential textbook).
I'd hate to think that my impression that the UCR Philosophy Department has strengthed considerably since 1997 is just another of my self-serving delusions. (Not that I know what the other ones are!) The numbers above at least seem to lend some objectivity to my impression.
So what's the explanation of our virtually unchanged ranking? Not conspiracy, of course, nor the ill will of Brian Leiter (who has spoken kindly of us over the years). Some institutions (for example, USC and Yale) have climbed sharply, so it must be possible. Is the issue, perhaps, that in order to pierce the top 25 a department must have at least one full-time super-heavyweight, and no one in the department is perceived that way? Or were we too highly ranked early on? Or have our peer departments improved just as sharply? Or...? I have a feeling there something to learn here about UCR or about the ranking system....
Update, December 15, 2011:
Between 2009 and 2011 we lost about 25% of our senior faculty. We lost Paul Hoffman (death), Robin Jeshion (USC), Charles Siewert (Rice), and Georgia Warnke (UCR Political Science). Maudemarie Clark went from full-time to 2/3 time. We hired one assistant professor, Josef Muller. In 2009 we were ranked #30. Now we're ranked #31. Not that I'm complaining.