Comments on: University Wealth and Philosophical Reputation

By: deborah kazazis

deborah kazazis — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 08:37:37 +0000

A very interesting series of hypotheses was put forth in the comments. If one looks at universities using the metaphor of the family, then the overall correlation (there will always be exceptions which will have to be accounted for on the basis of individual “taste”) is as follows: the wealthier the university/family, the more it will tend to invest in/consume high-prestige items. These may be quite costly in economic terms (particle physics labs) or quite conspicuous by virtue by their absence of economic pay-off (philosophy departments). // There is, I believe, general agreement among academics that philosophy is the highest-prestige humanities field; therefore, it makes good sense for a university with excess wealth (spare endowment) to spend a small portion of this to maintain prestige (Princeton) or for an aspiring university (NYU) to mimic this state of affairs (cf. the spending/consumption habits of the nouveau-riche family). // An interesting side-issue relating to high-prestige humanities fields concerns the male-female distribution of faculty within these. On the whole, philosophy is a male-dominated academic discipline (and therefore, higher-prestige)as opposed, e.g., to the philology disciplines (English, French), where there obtains a somewhat more balanced distribution of male-female practitioners. Thus it would seem that there is also a correlation between high-prestige humanities disciplines and male-dominated humanities disciplines, which in itself constitutes a (latent) sub-argument in favor of investment in philosophy (rather than French or English) by universities, which tend to behave overall in a patriarchal fashion when viewed through the family-structure metaphor.// Again, there will always be exceptions which closer familiarity with a particular institution requires to satisfactorily explain. For example, to account for Yale’s low philosophy ranking (vis-a-vis Princeton and Harvard), one might respond that Yale’s high-prestige humanities “surplus” has for several decades now been ciphoned off to its French Department, probably the best in the country.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 15:19:00 +0000

Kenny, I think that explanation is also why Pittsburgh has such a good philosophy department; an ambitious president wanted to build its reputation, starting with philosophy, but there was a financial crisis before he could build other departments to a comparable level.

Incidentally I believe that Pittsburgh was private when this started, and only became public a few years after the philosophy department made its first significant hires (when the state bailed it out of this crisis). But I’m not sure of the chronology.

By: Nigel Sedgwick

Nigel Sedgwick — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 11:33:04 +0000

Are you perchance advancing the hypothesis that university endowments are dependent more on the reputation of each philosophy department than on that of each university as a whole?

If so, please may I suggest that more evidence is needed. For example, scatterplots and linear regression lines for endowments against overall reputation, or plots of endowments against: philosophy department reputation divided by overall reputation.

Best regards

By: Kenny Easwaran

Kenny Easwaran — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 11:20:13 +0000

In response to Tom Hurka’s worry that philosophy might be a low-prestige discipline, I recall something someone told me once about why NYU chose philosophy to build up over the last fifteen years or so. (Misremembered hearsay of a conjecture might not be reliable, but at least this theory sounds explanatory.) They wanted to build their overall reputation, so they wanted to build a “core” department – the natural choices would be the prototypical ones (like English, History, Math, Philosophy, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Economics, Law) that basically every university has to have. Out of these philosophy seems prima facie to be by far the cheapest to improve – the lab sciences need expensive equipment, law and economics need to compete with industry, and math, history, and english are huge departments where you’d need to pay the salary of dozens of big names, where in philosophy you can get by with barely more than a dozen total. So philosophy seems like the easiest way to trade money for prestige, unless its prestige factor were substantially less than that of these other disciplines (which it might be with biology or physics, given the extra newspaper mentions every breakthrough generates, but unlikely with most of the others).

By: Jim Hu

Jim Hu — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 06:19:47 +0000

#8 Matt,

…But, it seems obvious to me that they will have a much harder time than, say, Rutgers for three reasons, even if A&M has more money. 1) At Rugters you can commute easily from NY City, while A&M’s location is, let’s say, rather less desirable. 2) Rutgers is close enough to several other top universities to provide for a rich intellectual life, while A&M isn’t. 3) A&M is full of Texans. Those three will trump endowment size any time, I’d guess.

Yes, but Texas is much higher and also meets at least 2 out of 3…although Austin is probably more appealing to most philosophers than College Station, it ain’t NYC and it’s not surrounded by other top schools.

Note that the only other cases I can see with the multiple state universities, Arizona v Arizona State, and Indiana v Purdue, the one I think of as being the Ag school is lower. I didn’t see Michigan State or Iowa State. Davis ranks higher than some of the other UC schools (but not others)…maybe it’s not at the bottom due to the appeal to philosophers of the oenology program!

By: Jacob T. Levy

Jacob T. Levy — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 02:22:48 +0000

Have I ever mentioned how aesthetically offensive I find the use of “to instrument” as a transitive verb?

;-)

By: radek

radek — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 22:02:56 +0000

“Is this ‘impressive = rich’ or ‘rich = impressive’?

Well, this is why we need theory, or much more data (depending on whom you ask).”

Instrumenting prestige of the philosophy department with the general ranking of the university should cut down on some of the simultanity, at least as a first cut. Or at least it should be controlled for if yer regressing prestige on endowment.

Also the state funds the publics get could potentially be an instrument, to the extent that they’re not related to prestige but to other factors.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 20:34:46 +0000

bza – fixed.

By: Tad Brennan

Tad Brennan — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 20:23:14 +0000

Wow. The new per capita graph makes the correlation look even stronger.

Add into that the fact that Leiter urges people to treat numbers within 0.3 of each other as rough ties on the aggregate ranking, so that you could “fatten” the regression line to about 0.3 thick along its length (or put vertical error bars on the university-points, or what have you). That would put even more schools on the line.

Of course, this whole thing raises the specter that Leiter could dispense with asking philosophers what they think of other philosophers and the merits of their philosophical work, and just ask them to assign numbers directly to the institutions’ endowments. “In your considered judgement as a philosopher, which institution do you think has the higher per capita endowment?” Sure, it would miss a few nuances here and there, but not that much, apparently….

By: bza

bza — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 19:47:14 +0000

Another miscode: Washington University (I assume that’s what “WshU” is) is private.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 18:36:01 +0000

I’m just perpetually amazed at Princeton’s endowment per student.

Yeah. It’s about 1.2 million dollars per head.

By: Jacob T. Levy

Jacob T. Levy — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 18:27:45 +0000

I’m amazed that Princeton can manage to outscore the line on endowment per student—no matter what the dependent variable. But then, I’m just perpetually amazed at Princeton’s endowment per student.

By: greensmile

greensmile — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 16:58:38 +0000

Speaking as a life long software engineer [though trained in physics, I must tell you I am offended by your insensitivity to the value of those disciplines betokened by your remark that “…When it comes to investing in prestige, philosophers may be a good bet for an urban university. Occasional foodies notwithstanding, they do not take up much space compared to, say, particle accelerators or engineering labs.

Allthough philsophy comforts many afflictions of those who do their homework, it is still the case that “philosophy bakes no bread”. Are we to amend this old saw? perhaps “Philosophy bakes no bread but it gets a lot more bang for the buck than an engineering department.”?

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 16:44:21 +0000

I think the story at Rutgers isn’t what Richard says- rather, they had a philosophy faculty member (Richard Foley, I think, now at NYU, but not the cause of NYU’s rise, since he moved there after that) who had a high administrative position (maybe dean) and was willing and able to send large amounts of money for senior hires to the philosophy dept. The proximity to NY city also helps, of course. (It would be harder to do the same at, say Iowa.) And, nothing is succesful like success, so once you hire Jerry Fodor and some others, other top people are happy to come along. (The actual facilities at Rutgers are nothing to get excited about- compared to, say, Princeton, the offices, rooms, etc. at Rutgers look like a high-school.)

By: Richard Bellamy

Richard Bellamy — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 16:11:20 +0000

Rutgers’ outlier status likely results from the fact that it was a private school through World War II, and then went public and started accepting public funds on top of an already successful private entity.

It managed to retain its private school cache in a way that I don’t really see attached to other public universities other than, say, Berkeley.