New APPS

I have read in several places this description of my placement post and my response to Brian Leiter's criticisms of that post (most recently, in comments posted yesterday at Philosophical Comment): 

"July 1:  I posted a sharp critique of some utterly misleading rankings produced by Carolyn Jennings, a  tenure-stream faculty member at UC Merced.  She quickly started revising it after I called her out."

For the record, this does not strike me as an accurate representation of those events. 

First, while I did post a ranking, I made it clear that I did this as an exercise: (from the original post, bold original) "As discussed here in the comments, one of the advantages of comparative data on placement is that they help fill in gaps left over by the PGR…To illustrate this, I below rank the top 50 departments by tenure-track placement rate**, providing for comparison these department's ranks from the 2011 "Ranking Of Top 50 Faculties In The English-Speaking World" by the Philosophical Gourmet Report. Please note that this placement ranking is provided only to demonstrate the potential utility of these data."

Second, while Brian Leiter did find the rankings misleading, many others did not, and even commended the clarity of language in my post. Take these quotes from David Marshall Miller, who has also worked on placement data: "Andrew Carson and, especially, Carolyn Dicey Jennings have developed analyses that now strike me as very robust." and "I will say, to again quote Leiter, that “all such exercises are of very limited value.” Nevertheless, they are of some use, and should be made available, so long as the methodology and limitations of the analysis are made clear. I think the PGR and the placement rankings by Jennings, Carson, and myself all meet this standard." 

Third, Brian did post criticisms of the ranking, but I did not make any substantial revisions to the ranking based on his criticisms, since I did not find those criticisms to have merit. Brian's way of characterizing my response at the time was "Prof. Jennings digs in her heels."

I did later make one relatively substantial change to the post, which was to move from a placement ranking to placement brackets. This idea emerged from discussion with others, as I note at the post itself, and was in no way inspired by Brian's criticisms. 

The only change that I did make, as a result of Brian's criticisms, was to look at the NYU placement page to discover whether my method had failed to capture all of NYU's tenure-track placements. It had. In point of fact, I predicted that the method would fail to capture some placements. As a reminder, the original post described "placement rate" this way, "The average yearly tenure-track placements reported at ProPhilosophy and PhilAppointments between 2011 and 2014 divided by the average yearly graduates between 2009 and 2013 as reported in the 2013 APA Guide to Graduate Programs or by email" and included the caveat "Since the data set is not yet complete, I do not recommend viewing these as an authoritative ranking" (from the original post, bold original). So long as the method did not particularly disadvantage NYU, this shouldn't have been a problem, as I explain in my response to Brian's criticisms. Nonetheless, I added in those two placements. As I suspected, as other departments sent in their own missed placements, NYU dropped back down to a similar position in the ranking, and I still haven't checked the placement pages for most departments. (NYU was found with these methods to have a placement rate that originally put it at rank #24, but which now puts it at rank #20–although, again, this is in no way supposed to be authoritative, as I have stressed from the very first version of this post, but an exercise to demonstrate the ultility of comparative placement data. I am still exploring these issues and am not at all sure whether rank is the best way to capture placement data. I used rank only because it enabled me to make a comparison with the PGR, which is also true of an earlier iteration of my placement analysis). 

If Brian's statement fairly represented these facts, it would read more like the following: "July 1: I posted a sharp critique of a post by Carolyn Jennings, a tenure-stream faculty member at UC Merced, that I found utterly misleading."