2012 Journal Citation Reports

... for however little such things are worth (see here for the latest on how poor a measure IF is), but for various bureaucratic purposes it's sometimes useful to be able to check them quickly.  An assortment of theory-friendly journals:

American Political Science Review, Impact Factor 3.933, #1 in Political Science
Perspectives on Politics, 1.963, #10 in Political Science
Philosophy and Public Affairs, Impact Factor 1.958, #3 in Ethics
Journal of Political Philosophy, 1.609, #5 in Ethics, #19 in Political Science
Journal of Politics, 1.577, #22 in Political Science
Ethics, 1.372, #11 in Ethics
Political Studies, .917, #54 in Political Science
Political Theory, .703, #77 in Political Science
Social Philosophy and Policy, .630, #27 in Ethics
Polity, .422, #104 in Political Science
Journal of Applied Philosophy, .373, #35 in Ethics
Politics,  Philosophy, and Economics, .351, #36 in Ethics
Contemporary Political Theory, .237, #137 in Political Science
Journal of Moral Philosophy, .235, #41 in Ethics

Still not included in the JCR: Review of Politics, History of Political Thought, Journal of the History of Ideas, European Journal of Political Theory.

PT's Impact Factor has rebounded a long way after spending a number of years in the low .400s.  But JPP has continued to climb in impact-- I think this is its first year in the Poli Sci top 20, and its highest IF ever.  I think it's been more than ten years since PT outranked JPP on these measures.

[NB: I have published in PT and not in JPP.  I'm noting, not celebrating.]

Does it count as beating a dead horse if the horse won?

I've written up my final reflections on tuition and the student boycott at Academic Matters magazine.  My colleague Daniel Weinstock argues for the other side.

Cheap tuition and mobility

Remember what I was saying before about the problematic relationship between cheap tuition and education that enables professional mobility?

http://www.ledevoir.com/politique/elections-2012/357986/les-medecins-qui-quittent-le-quebec-doivent-rembourser-l-etat-dit-legault".>Yeah.

The system works fine if the education you offer doesn't enable high emigration to better professional opportunities.  (Or if you offer sufficient professional opportunities at home-- say, by licensing doctors who want to practice in under-served Montreal.)  But if you accidentally allow some part of the system to provide taxpayer-funded training to people who then emigrate in large numbers, then little things like freedom of movement become unattractive, notwithstanding (so to speak) any constitutional worries.

Perspective

Two days ago I sent a grumpy note to a Canadian granting agency about some isues in the grant adjudication process. Yesterday I griped all day about FQRSC/ SSHRC/ Common CV forms. Nothing quite like having the US House of Representatives vote to defund NSF funding to one's whole discipline to put the Canadian annoyances into perspective.

Political philosophy rankings

The top 20 programs in political philosophy, from the new round of Leiter's Philosophical Gourmet Report

Group 1 (1): rounded mean of 4.5 (median, mode)
University of Arizona (4.5, 4.5)

Group 2 (2-9): rounded mean of 4.0 (median, mode)
Brown University (4, 4)
Duke University (4, 4)
Harvard University (4.25, 5)
New York University (4.5, 4.5)
Oxford University (4, 5)
Princeton University (4, 4)
Stanford University (4, 4)
Yale University (4, 4)

Group 3 (10-20): rounded mean of 3.5 (median, mode)
Australian National University (3.5, 4)
Queen’s University (Canada) (3.5, 4)
Rutgers University, New Brunswick (3.5, 3.75)
University College London (3.5, 3.5)
University of California, San Diego (4, 4)
University of Chicago (3.5, 3.5)
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (4, 4)
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (4, 4)
University of Pennsylvania (3.5, 3.5)
University of Toronto (3.5, 4)
University of Virginia (4, 4)

JTL: I have friends and colleagues who've been involved in the serious pushes and investments Arizona, Brown, and Duke in particular have made in political philosophy in the past several years, and am very pleased to see their excellence and progress recognized.

Yer doin' it wrong

Inside Higher Ed reports:

A plan to eliminate 15 faculty positions regardless of tenure status might hit some speed bumps if Albion College’s faculty handbook were followed, but the college’s trustees have decided to ignore that minor inconvenience.

When Albion faculty said the dismissals might violate the handbook, the board promptly passed a resolution washing their hands of the guidelines. Indeed, the board didn’t even bother to say which parts of the book they would change; the trustees simply declared that anything standing in their way was "amended effective immediately."

And the resolution does indeed say, simply,

RESOLVED that exercising the authority of the Board of Trustees under the Charter of 1857, the Faculty Handbook is amended effective immediately in all ways necessary to
permit the reduction of 15 full time equivalent (FTE) existing faculty positions, which may include tenured faculty positions, by the beginning of the 2010-2011
academic year.

Some of the faculty have advanced various interpretations of the Faculty Handbook which are incompatible with the trustees’ fiduciary obligation to govern the College.
The Board of Trustees reaffirms its fundamental commitment to academic freedom, which tenure protects.

This amendment is made effective immediately because the Board considers it an emergency that the Board’s authority in this area be clarified.

Now, final resolution of the relationship between faculty governance and trustee authority is hard to come by, and one usually wants to avoid pushing things to the point where a resolution is needed. But let's say that the trustees are right that they have the responsibility and authority to act unilaterally if they need to. Suppose that they have the authority to unilaterally amend the Faculty hHandbook-- which is likely to be legally correct.

They still haven't acted.

"the Faculty Handbook is amended effective immediately in all ways necessary to
permit the reduction of 15 full time equivalent (FTE) existing faculty positions, which may include tenured faculty positions, by the beginning of the 2010-2011
academic year."

has no actual amendments contained within its language. The thing about written legal documents is that they contain actual words-- and amending them requires substituting other actual words, or else specifying which original words are being deleted. You can't simply declare a policy goal.

If the Faculty Handbook posed an ex ante obstacle to the firings, then I can't see that that obstacle has been removed.

Update: Paul Gowder thinks I'm wrong about this. As you'll see in the comments over there, I think he's wrong in thinking me wrong.

Study at Quebec universities to offer fast-track to Canadian citizenship

The lead story in the Chronicle this afternoon:

Quebec Offers Fast-Tracked Canadian Citizenship to Foreign Students
By Karen Birchard
Quebec is playing the citizenship card in a bid to recruit to Canada foreign students who might otherwise be tempted to study in Australia, Britain, or the United States.

The province's premier, Jean Charest, who is leading a delegation of university heads on a visit to India, told a packed meeting at the University of Mumbai on Monday that, starting on February 14, foreign students who graduated from universities in Quebec would get "a certificate of selection" that would put them on a fast track to Canadian citizenship.

"Any student who secures a bachelor's, master's, or doctoral degree from any university in Quebec will obtain a certificate of selection to become a citizen of Canada ," said Mr. Charest, according to The Times of India. "We have the right to select our own citizens. We are doing this because we have a shortage of skilled labor."

Mr. Charest said that once foreign students had the certificate, the federal government would then carry out security and health checks before awarding citizenship.

Unsettling news on higher education in Quebec

Via Inside Higher Ed, a Globe and Mail poll revealed significant gaps between francophone and anglophone Canadians on the value of higher education:

Canada's two solitudes endure in the value placed on higher education, with English-speaking young adults twice as likely as their francophone peers to see a university degree as the key to success, according to a new national poll.

[...]
The poll, conducted last month for the group by Leger Marketing and released exclusively to The Globe and Mail, asked 1,500 Canadians in all parts of the country if they thought a university degree was now a minimum requirement for success. What it found was a wide gap in views when the respondents' first language was taken into account - a gap that only increased when results of the youngest of those surveyed were broken out.

Fewer than 20 per cent of 18- to 24-year-old French speakers said a university degree was required, compared with 40 per cent of the English group. That difference increased even more when compared with those whose first language is neither English or French - generally first- or second-generation Canadians. More than two-thirds of young people in this group agreed a degree is needed to be successful, a result that is in keeping with the high percentage of new Canadians who go on to higher education.

Big news

Brian Leiter reports that Jeremy Waldron has accepted the Chichele Chair in Social and Political Theory at Oxford University on a half-time basis.

Waldron (the first non-Montrealer to hold the chair in more than thirty years!) was widely thought to be the correct and even obvious choice for the preeminent position in the field. Several years worth of puzzlement about how to proceed with a Plan B followed when (or so it is said; all my knowledge here is of the "everyone knows" variety) it seemed that he was not movable from New York. This compromise is an outcome to be welcomed all around-- good for political theory at Oxford, good for the field, and (I hope and trust) good for Waldron.

No great surprise, but noteworthy:

Senate defeats Coburn amendment on NSF funding of political science.

MacArthur

Looks like I can just repost this verbatim, with this year's link on top, and substituting in "one economist."

posted September 23 2008: Continuing a recent trend...

noted here and here, academic humanists and social scientists are in notably short supply among this year's MacArthur Fellows. One archaeologist-anthropologist and one retired historian, out of a group of 25. The awardees are mainly practicing artists (novelist, violinist, sculptor, etc) or academic scientists, biomedical researchers, and engineers.

North America's leading Proust scholar and all his spiritual kin are safe for another year.

G.A. Cohen

I was on vacation and away from blogging access when I received the sad news of G.A. Cohen's sudden passing. I seem to be among the few practicing political theorists who had never met him-- he was twice away from Oxford when I happened to be coming through to give a paper, and his last visitorship at McGill was five years before my arrival, though we had been in intermittent touch about bringing him back for a semester in the next few years. Given the tremendous personal presence described by his friends, students, and colleagues, I'm sorry not to have had the chance. In any case, I have nothing of personal note to add to the touching remembrances many have already posted. (See Chris Bertram, his roundup of others' notes, this delightful one from Chris Brooke, Jo Wolff, etc.)

But the following paragraph seemed to me to warrant highlighting here:

Like his immediate predecessor as the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford, Gerald Allan Cohen was born and educated in Montreal [indeed, both received BAs from McGill-- JTL]. There, the similarities end. Charles Taylor embodied the two founding cultures of his home city, French and Scottish, while Cohen recalled that he was 10 years old before he realised that there were some people who were neither Jews nor communists.

Cohen wrote of his "Montreal Communist Jewish childhood" in If You're An Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?, a partly-autobiographical work from 2006 that explores the roots of his own egalitarian commitments. In it he noted the complex place of McGill in the social world of his childhood: an object of "widespread hope and expectation," but also one to which Jewish children were taught "we would gain admission[...] only if we scored rather better than the minimum required for non-Jews," even years after McGill's "delicate discrimination" against Jews had ceased.

That reminds me to link again to Judith Shklar's autobiographical essay, and her remarks about her own undergraduate days at McGill-- when the discrimination was still in full force.

I do not look back fondly to my college days at McGill University either. That may have something to do with the then-prevailing entrance rules: 750 points for Jews and 600 for everyone else. Nor was it an intellectually exciting institution, but at least when I arrived there, just before my 17th birthday, I was lucky to be in the same class as many ex-servicemen, whose presence made for an unusually mature and serious student body. And compared to school it was heaven. Moreover, it all worked out surprisingly well for me. I met my future husband and was married at the end of my junior year, by far the smartest thing I ever did. And I found my vocation.

Originally I had planned to major in a mixture of philosophy and economics, the rigor of which attracted me instantly. But when I was required to take a course in money and banking it became absolutely obvious to me that I was not going to be a professional economist. Philosophy was, moreover, mainly taught by a dim gentleman who took to it because he had lost his religious faith. I have known many confused people since I encountered this poor man, but nobody quite as utterly unfit to teach Plato or Descartes. Fortunately for me I was also obliged to take a course in the history of political theory taught by an American, Frederick Watkins. After two weeks of listening to this truly gifted teacher I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. If there was any way of making sense of my experiences and that of my particular world, this was it.

Watkins was a remarkable man, as the many students whom he was to teach at Yale can testify. He was an exceptionally versatile and cultivated man and a more than talented teacher. He not only made the history of ideas fascinating in his lectures, but he also somehow conveyed the sense that nothing could be more important. I also found him very reassuring. For in many ways, direct and indirect, he let me know that the things I had been brought up to care for, classical music, pictures, literature, were indeed worthwhile, and not my personal eccentricities. His example, more than anything overtly said, gave me a great deal of self-confidence, and I would have remembered him gratefully, even if he had not encouraged me to go on to graduate school, to apply to Harvard, and then to continue to take a friendly interest in my education and career. It is a great stroke of luck to discover one’s calling in one’s late teens, and not everyone has the good fortune to meet the right teacher at the right time in her life, but I did, and I have continued to be thankful for the education that he offered me so many years ago.

Sage and Political Theory roundup

I haven't said anything in this space about recent developments at the journal Political Theory; by the time all the facts were in so that anything responsible could be said, there was nothing left to say. But it's worth noting that Inside Higher Ed has picked up on the story and provided an overview.

Update: The Chronicle, too. Therein a tangential comment I made elsewhere is deemed "provocative."

Journal rankings

The 2008 ISI journal rankings are out. Impact factors for selected journals of interest around here:

APSR: 1.725
Journal of Politics: 1.685
Philosophy & Public Affairs: 1.500
Ethics: 1.053
Journal of Political Philosophy: .902
Political Studies .625
Political Theory .403

Coverage remains bizarrely spotty in the rankings, and many journals covered by ISI's citation indices aren't included. History of Political Thought, European Journal of Political Theory, Review of Politics, Journal of the History of Ideas, and Polity are among the journals not listed in the rankings, while Critical Review, the Indpendent Review, the Nation, Commentary, Dissent, and the New Republic all show up. (Remember, this is supposed to be a list of scholarly journals.)

The APSR is ranked *tenth* in political science by 2008 impact factor. Five-year impact factor and the new Article Influence Score both give the expected result that the APSR is ranked first. Eyeballing the lists, it looks to me as if the 5-year IF, the AIS, and my intuitions all line up in most cases, while the one-year IF has some weird anomalies.

Academic freedom, SSHRC, and York U conference on Israel and Palestine

Les Green has been doing yeoman's work at keeping information flowing about the genuine threat to academic freedom posed by Minister of Science Gary Goodyear's intervention in the SSHRC peer-reviewed grant-making procedure. Academics who are on facebook, please come join the group he's formed and read and circulate the open letter from York faculty, also quoted below.

Sometimes there's a tendency to cry "academic freedom" only when one's own ox is being gored-- especially on Israel/ Palestine questions. If I were to attend the conference at York, I'm pretty sure that I'd be annoyed-to-outraged by a great deal of what I'd hear. And lots of invocations of academic freedom these days are just complaints that one is being criticized.

But politicized interference in what are supposed to be arm's-length impartial systems of peer review-- that's an absolutely clear violation of academic freedom. SSHRC has already compromised itself by agreeing to the extraordinary review of the grant at ministerial request; it needs to not only maintain the funding but also make a strong statement about the inappropriateness of political intervention in peer review.

Anyway, please come join the facebook group both to follow the news and to convey the support of the academic community for the York faculty who are taking the lead in this fight.

Open Letter to SSHRC President from Faculty members of Osgoode Hall Law School

June 14, 2009

AN OPEN LETTER FROM MEMBERS OF THE FACULTY OF
OSGOODE HALL LAW SCHOOL AT YORK UNIVERSITY

Dr. Chad Gaffield
President
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
350 Albert Street, P.O. Box 1610
Ottawa, Ontario, K1P 6G4

Dear Dr. Gaffield:

Re: Review of SSHRC Funding for Conference at York University: “Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace”

We are writing as members of the faculty of Osgoode Hall Law School at York University to express our extreme dismay that SSHRC appears to be acceding to political pressure by revisiting its decision to fund the above-noted academic conference.

As you know, two of our esteemed colleagues, Professors Susan Drummond and Bruce Ryder, have taken a lead role in planning this event and we write in part to support them and their co-organizers, Professor Sharry Aiken and PhD Candidate Mazen Masri. However this issue has grown far beyond the need to support individual colleagues. Your decision as SSHRC President to require a special pre-conference accounting from the conference organizers, outside the normal post-conference reporting procedures for conference grants, raises the much larger question of your agency’s integrity as a funder and promoter of independent university-based research in Canada.

As a group we have extensive experience with the organization of academic conferences and with SSHRC granting procedures. We believe there is no basis at all for the suggestion that “major changes” were made to the plan for this conference after the grant application had been peer reviewed and funding granted. Nor do we believe that you could
possibly see any basis for this suggestion. Rather, it appears that the special accounting was demanded of our colleagues in direct response to the unprecedented and entirely inappropriate political intervention of Minister Goodyear.

We believe that SSHRC made a serious error in acceding to political interference in this manner. Whether or not SSHRC ultimately submits to the demand for a new peer review that better meets the Minister’s political ends, and whether or not the funding for this conference is ultimately jeopardized, we fear that SSHRC has already compromised the autonomy of academic research in this country. By intruding into the planning of an academic event after a funding decision has been made, SSHRC’s actions are likely to have a most unfortunate chilling effect on academics considering the exploration of controversial or unpopular topics. In addition, by casting doubt on the integrity of its own procedures, SSHRC has empowered those who would devalue academic research and discourse by insisting that academic freedom be reserved only for those who happen to share their point of view.

We hope that SSHRC will very shortly stand up to defend its own granting procedures and the values of academic excellence and autonomy they are designed to protect.

Sincerely,

Harry W. Arthurs, Professor Emeritus, Former Dean, Former President

Margaret E. Beare, Professor

Neil Brooks, Professor

Ruth Buchanan, Associate Professor

Jamie B. Cameron, Professor

Mary G. Condon, Professor

Carys J. Craig, Associate Professor

Giuseppina D’Agostino, Assistant Professor

Paul D. Emond, Associate Professor

Trevor C.W. Farrow, Associate Professor

Simon R. Fodden, Professor Emeritus

Shelley A.M. Gavigan, Professor

Joan M. Gilmour, Associate Professor

Leslie Green, Professor

Richard Haigh, Visiting Professor

Balfour J. Halévy, Professor Emeritus

Doug Hay, Professor

Allan C. Hutchinson, Distinguished Research Professor

Shin Imai, Associate Professor

Shelley Kierstead, Assistant Professor

Sonia Lawrence, Associate Professor

Jinyan Li, Professor

Michael Mandel, Professor

Ikechi Mgbeoji, Associate Professor

Louis Mirando, Chief Law Librarian

Janet Mosher, Associate Professor and Associate Dean

Mary Jane Mossman, Professor of Law (sign. after initial release)

Roxanne Mykitiuk, Associate Professor

Obiora Chinedu Okafor, Professor

Lisa Philipps, Associate Professor

Marilyn L. Pilkington, Associate Professor and Former Dean

Poonam Puri, Associate Professor

Sean Rehaag, Assistant Professor

Benjamin J. Richardson, Professor

Brian Slattery, Professor

Sara Slinn, Assistant Professor

James Stribopoulos, Associate Professor

Craig M. Scott, Professor

Kate Sutherland, Associate Professor

François Tanguay-Renaud, Assistant Professor

Eric M. Tucker, Professor

Gus Van Harten, Assistant Professor

Robert S. Wai, Associate Professor

Garry D. Watson, Professor

Cynthia Williams, Osler Chair in Business Law

Stepan Wood, Associate Professor

Alan N. Young, Associate Professor

Peer Zumbansen, Canada Research Chair & Associate Dean (Research, Graduate Studies and Institutional Relations)

Cc:
Bruce B. Ryder, Associate Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School
Susan G. Drummond, Associate Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School
Sharry J. Aiken, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen’s University
Mazen Masri, Ph.D. candidate, Osgoode Hall Law School
Mamdouh Shoukri, President, York University
Stan Shapson, Vice-President (Research & Innovation), York University
Patrick Monahan, Dean of Law and VPA-Elect, York University
Mr. J. Craig McNaughton, Senior Program Officer Strategic Grants and joint Initiatives, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
James L. Turk, Executive Director, Canadian Association of University Teachers
The Hon. Gary Goodyear, Minister of State (Science & Technology)
The Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada
Dr. Marc Garneau, Liberal Critic for Industry, Science and Technology
Mr. Jim Maloway, NDP Critic for Science and Technology
M Robert Vincent, Bloc Critic for Science and Technology

AAAS, &c.

Via Brian Leiter, the new elections to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences have been announced. (See earlier AAAS posts: 2008, 2007, 2006.

Two political theorists were elected, Philip Pettit and Danielle Allen. (Of interest to students of nationalism: Rogers Brubaker was also elected.) I suggested two years ago that "Philip Pettit is surely overdue."

Another year, another opportunity to ask: Where is Michael Walzer on this list?

In other news, Gerald Gaus has been awarded the Gregory Kavka Prize in Political Philosophy for his article "On Justifying the Moral Rights of the Moderns: A Case of Old Wine in New Bottles," Social Philosophy and Policy (2007), 24:1:84-119.

Update: Just noticed this. Go back to the list of new inductees and scroll down to the very final name on the last page.

Carole Pateman nominated for APSA presidency

From the APSA newsletter:

After careful consideration of suggestions from the APSA membership and organized groups, the Nominating Committee has agreed on the following slate of distinguished political scientists as its nominees for elective office in the association. [...] Unless there is any contestation, elected officers will assume office following action at the Business Meeting on September 5 at the 2009 APSA Annual Meeting in Toronto. If there is a contest, an election will be held by ballot of the entire membership. Procedures for nominations are documented in Article V (1, 2) of the APSA Constitution and Section 4 of the Business Meeting Rules.

President-Elect (2009-10)
Carole Pateman, UCLA

The President-Elect holds that title for one year, and then assumes the Presidency after the following year's [2010, in this case] annual meeting.

While the most accomplished political scientists often cross subfields, and many APSA presidents have engaged with or contributed to political theory (Beer, Lowi, Lipset, Dahl, Rudolph, etc.), by my reckoning Pateman will be only the second APSA president whose primary field is political theory in the past 45 years, after Judith Shklar, and the third in the past fifty, adding in Carl Friedrich.

Pateman was also the first woman president of the International Political Science Association.

In Memoriam: Brian Barry

Brian Leiter has the news. Harry Brighouse follows up.

Update: My only sustained public engagement with him as a thinker was not a particularly sympathetic one. But I was tremendously impressed with both Sociologists, Economists and Democracy and Political Argument as a grad student; he was a lifelong advocate of keeping normative political work engaged with social science and social theory; and his long work at the journal Ethics did a tremendous amount for political and moral philosophy and theory. By my reckoning he didn't just raise the standards of the journal; he raised the standards of the field.

On a more personal level: I didn't know Barry well-- but I got to know him toward the end of my time as a graduate student, when I was commuting from New York to Princeton and he was teaching at Columbia. He and his wife Anni were personally incredibly warm and welcoming to me; and intellectually he treated me as someone worth talking and arguing with about our areas of shared interest. I shared a drink with him on several occasions, and always enjoyed the experience and the conversation.

I had cause to complain about the way in which he read the work of some other people, but with regard to my own work, he had read it before we ever met, talked about it (in person and in print) fairly and accurately, and was supportive and encouraging about it. I think he was the first person who included my work on a syllabus, and I was still a grad student at the time; it's hard to overstate how flattered I was by this. And he was generous with time and advice, though he had no advisorly obligations to me.

Because he genuinely retired, I almost never saw him after the publication of my review linked to above; but he was in touch enough to make clear that he took it in good spirit, and indeed he asked whether I'd follow up with a review of Why Social Justice Matters. There's a traditional joke in political theory about the mismatch between official intellectual positions and personal style-- the civic republican who's a terrible departmental citizen, the deliberativist who will never let anyone else talk and the deliberativist who hates to talk, that kind of thing. Brian Barry often comes up as a central example-- the pugilist, brawler, or (depending on your perspective) dirty fighter on the printed page who was exceptionally warm, generous, and open in person. He knew this himself, and it seemed to amuse him. I had my quarrels with the printed pugilist-- but remember and appreciate that warm and generous man.

further update: Valuable comments continue to be posted at the Crooked Timber thread from Barry's colleagues and friends. Wyn Grant gets at what I was trying to express here: "He could certainly be pugancious and unwilling to suffer fools gladly, but he was very supportive to younger scholars." Jo Wolff recounts some more examples of the pugnaciousness-- and suggests that it represents a sense on Barry'spart that "political theory can be much easier than most people make it, provided that one keeps things clear, puts down one’s ideological axe, and resists the temptation to seek novelty or paradox for its own sake.” And Paul Kelleyalso emphasizes Barry'sinterest in keeping political philosophy intellectually engaged with the social sciences, in the service of doing normative work aimed at the world.

Leiter reports: political philosophy rankings

The 2008-09 round of the Leiter Report on philosophy departments is being released on Leiter's blog piecemeal, and today there's a list of interest to many readers of this blog: political philosophy.

Top 9 Faculties in "Political Philosophy" in the English-Speaking World

In the specialty rankings, faculties are grouped according to their mean score, rounded to the nearest .5. In parentheses after the school's name, the median and mode scores are listed. Within the grouping, faculties are listed alphabetically.

Group 1 (1-3) (rounded mean of 4.5) (median, mode)

Harvard University (5, 5)
New York University (5, 5)
University of Arizona (4.5, 4.5)

Group 2 (4-9) (rounded mean of 4.0) (median, mode)

Brown University (4, 4)
Oxford University (4.25, 4.5)
Princeton University (4, 5)
Stanford University (4.5, 4.5)
University College London (3.75, 3.75)
Yale University (4, 4.25)

This is a very good list, and shows the value of the Leiter Reports. Even though Arizona has been an excellent program in legal and/or political philosophy more often than not in my lifetime, I think it still gets undervalued in some circles just because the university as a whole isn't a traditional name-brand research powerhouse. Brown and Stanford have made important new commitments to political philosophy over the past several years, and I think either would now be a terrific place to study the field, but that's relatively new, and the kind of thing that could take a long time to become conventional wisdom.

Compared with the 2006 list (I assume that at some point that link will start pointing to the new list, but it hasn't yet):

Oxford has dropped to group 2 (G.A. Cohen has retired and not yet been replaced)
NYU has risen to group 1 (Samuel Scheffler has been hired)
Michigan has dropped out of group 2 (lost Darwall, but I'm still surprised at the drop)
Berkeley has dropped out of group 2 (lost Scheffler)
Toronto has dropped out of group 2 (lost Sreenivasan and Hawkins, but I'm still surprised at the drop)
Rutgers has dropped out of group 2 (probably some obvious reason for this but I don't recall)
Yale has risen into group 2

For what it's worth, I would still think that Michigan ought to be somewhere near the top.

The news I miss on red-eye flights

Cass Sunstein chosen as new administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Congratulations to him!

Notes Orin Kerr, "this is terrific news for other legal academics. Cass currently writes about 120 law review articles a year, all of which place in top journals, amounting to about 30% of the total placed articles in those journals. With Cass working full-time in Washington, I'm betting that his scholarly productivity will plummet. He might write as few as 20 articles a year! That means that there will be 100 more non-Cass placements free every year for the next few years for the rest of us, which gives other scholars a great opportunity to place their articles while Cass is working in government."

But Orin neglects the cost to all of Cass' foregone coauthors.