Finally heard back from school X: I’m in. Most excellent news, and I think I’ll probably be going there. By the way, school X is the CUNY Graduate Center. I won’t dwell on the other schools, except to say that my CUNY advisor was right when he said schools ranked equal to or above CUNY but with which I had no contact would be unlikely to accept me. The Ivies were never in the cards, and I more or less knew that, although I had secret hopes that Penn might cast a favorable glance upon an old Kantian altar-boy. No such luck. Several of the other places I applied to were ranked (on Brian Leiter’s Philosophical Gourmet Report, make of it what you will) about equal with CUNY, and they turned me down.
One wonders to what extent high-profile rankings determine a department’s applicant pool, regardless of actual quality. The school I went to as an undergraduate, the University of Kansas, doesn’t make the Gourmet list, and I’m sure it suffered similarly “Eh” status back in the day. The faculty when I was there was varied and competent. We had a British analyst and Hume scholar, a mathematical logician, a phil of science guy, a superb Kant scholar, a couple of metaphysicians (good for what ails ya), an ethical and political philosophy specialist, and a couple of well-known Heidegger/Nietzsche/continental exponents, among others. All the faculty had degrees from places more famous than KU, and I found almost all of them impressive. The curriculum was thorough yet adventurous, and the bevy of grad students seemed pretty stoked about what they were doing. Still, KU would have been considered a middling, if not mediocre, department.
How can that be? Presumably a top department has people in several areas participating in the most interesting research. How well those top people teach and how much they’re devoted to teaching is probably secondary. In a large department, there’s probably a mix: top research people and good teachers, with some intersection between the two sets. And, one imagines, mediocre or simply less stellar (or ambitious) teachers and writers rounding out the roster. This begins to show how a department like KU’s, with a lot to offer and few outright weaknesses—but no “stars”—could fail to show up on Leiter’s radar.
The primary significance of these rankings seems to be not quality of education but prospects for employment after graduation. The two should have something to do with each other, and they probably do up to a point. I have no doubt that one learns a lot of philosophy at Princeton, or that I’ll learn a lot of philosophy at CUNY, or that I would have learned a lot at UConn. I just wish there were additional rankings based on teaching. No doubt those would be much harder to come by, since philosophers read one another’s published work all the time but hardly ever watch each other teach.
Ephebe's Journal 