Many of you will have seen the following Facebook update posted by both David Chalmers and Jason Stanley (it’s astonishing how events in the philosophy profession unfold over at Facebook!):
Over the past day or so, 24 members of the advisory board of the Philosophical Gourmet Report have signed a letter saying that they value the extraordinary service that Leiter has provided with the PGR, and that they now urge him to turn over the PGR to new management. The letter (drafted by David Chalmers, Jonathan Schaffer, Susanna Siegel, and Jason Stanley) has been delivered to Brian Leiter, who received it with good grace. We are in the process of collecting more signatures, and will soon make the letter public.
At this point, this is pretty much the best outcome anyone could hope for, in my opinion. It is now a matter of waiting to see how the situation will further unfold, but should Leiter agree to step down, a PGR led by a number of people from the current board seems like a very promising solution. Brian Weatherson weights in with some ideas/suggestions, and mentions in particular Leiter’s treatment of Linda Martín Alcoff a few years ago, which seems not to have been on the radar enough in recent discussions. (Every time I thought of the possibility of BL throwing some legalese at me on account of my post suggesting he step down from the PGR, I reassured myself that he had said similar things before about others, but with a different tone altogether.)
However, there is another aspect of Brian Leiter’s behavior that seems worth noting. I’ve been contacted by a graduate student at Chicago offering the following testimony:
In the wake of recent events, I would like to make a few observations which will hopefully lend some perspective to the discussion. One is that, like myself, a number of the graduate students at the University of Chicago feel that Brian Leiter has been a positive presence on campus since his arrival in 2008. I can't speak for everyone, but in my experience, his conduct towards us has been exemplary. He meets regularly with students whose dissertations he is supervising, getting back to them promptly with written comments on every chapter draft they submit. And he has been particularly forthcoming with advice to students he isn't advising, taking the time to read and comment on drafts of their papers. He is known to be encouraging even to students whose philosophical views he emphatically disagrees with. We don't see him all that often, given that he is located across the Midway in the law school, but when we do, we are treated with the kind of respect typically accorded to intellectual peers. That treatment can be hard to come by as a graduate student, and means a great deal. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any other senior philosopher who regularly invites students to give him feedback on drafts of his own work, or who listens to such feedback with the same level of seriousness.
I share the concern that many have expressed over the nasty statements that appear in the emails under discussion, and would never condone them. Nor would I want to say anything that might inadvertently minimize the damage they appear to have caused. Nonetheless, it seems to me that if we are going to have a discussion about how to level power imbalances within the profession, what transpires in the day to day lives of graduate students deserves as much consideration as what transpires in the philosophical blogosphere. Here Professor Leiter has made a difference, and I think that is something worth registering.
This echoes what I’ve often heard from those who know Leiter personally, namely that in person he is kind and polite, and so entirely different from his Internet persona. (I never met him, except for having shared the elevator with him once at the APA, I suspect.) Now, that Leiter seems to take such good care of graduate students at Chicago suggests that concern for the welfare of students is indeed one of the chief motivations for developing and maintaining the PGR over the years, as he has often mentioned.
This does not lead me to re-evaluate my position that his abusive Internet behavior is incompatible with running the PGR (for reasons expounded here), but it adds a level of complexity to the person which risks to go unnoticed given the current situation.
New APPS 
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