A rankings vacuum is unsustainable in the internet era

"No Rankings, Not Now, Not Ever" is the rallying cry for the October Statement, and over a hundred philosophers have signed. They think it would be better not to have rankings of philosophy departments. For all I say here, they might be right. The trouble is that there's no way to sustain an absence of rankings when the internet exists, so "no rankings" is not actually a live option.

Rankings are very easy to produce and distribute. With a few philosophers and a bottle of tequila, you can make up some idiosyncratic departmental rankings in an evening. With the internet, you can make it all instantly available to everyone. The funny thing is, I'd actually be more interested in your idiosyncratic tequila-driven rankings than the opinions of internet journalists with only a passing interest in philosophy, posting rankings promoted by the prominence of their media organizations. Even if I disagree with you, your rankings were made by philosophers who read lots of stuff while earning PhDs, and whose opinions I'm interested in engaging with. But in a battle for the attention of undergraduates from universities with few research-active philosophers (and worse, Deans!) the media and its promotional machinery can win.

As far as I know, there weren't any influential and public departmental rankings before the internet. Maybe some October Statement signers think there's a way to return to those days. I'm doubtful, because a rankings vacuum only seems possible in a pre-internet era. Back then, the only way to get everyone to see a set of departmental rankings was to send them physical copies of the rankings at considerable expense. For something to be distributed in this fashion, it had to be of very broad interest (like national election news or major league sports), or of interest to wealthy people who would pay for subscriptions (like an investment newsletter). Philosophy department rankings are neither.

Soon after the internet became a thing, rankings were on it. Distribution costs are now zero. Any philosopher can use the internet to promote an idiosyncratic agenda, and any website can spit its own rankings onto the internet and use them to sell ads. Heaven help you if your administration falls under the spell of rankings made by the media, perhaps because of the machinations of some consultant whose only graduate degree is an MBA. This will unleash influences on hiring and tenure decisions that no philosopher would find congenial.

October Statement signers may have some clever ideas about how to maintain a rankings vacuum, or systematically delegitimize all the rankings that will pop up. They should tell us! Many of them want a ranking-free informational database, which would in fact be very nice, but lots of rankings would spring up alongside it. I don't know how they could sustainably prevent bad rankings from influencing prospective graduate students and university administrators, who are interested in comparatively evaluating departments. The point of preventing the philosophical community from coming up with its own rankings would then be lost.

If the October Statement successfully prevented us from coming up with our own ranking system in the short term, philosophers might still build a centralized ranking system in the end. If QS or some other media-run set of rankings gained so much power that philosophers needed a defense against them, our professional associations might have to develop an officially approved ranking system that actually fit philosophers' needs, and make it rise above all the bad rankings with their stamp of approval. The time when philosophers were ruled by nonphilosophers' rankings would be remembered as a grim age. Instead of having such an age, we should build and support the best system of rankings we can now.

With editorship of the PGR turning over, we're in a moment of flexibility where new ideas could change how we rank departments. Brian Weatherson has some. Carolyn Jennings is trying to collect data on job placement, which is an end product of graduate education that we all care about. If you want to only have specialty area rankings, or more directly incorporate job placement data in the ranking process, or democratically elect evaluators, this is the time to speak up! Many people who signed the October Statement probably have smart things to say about what would make a ranking system better (hi Jenny Saul!). We'd benefit if they'd express them in our emerging discipline-wide conversation.

The only options are good rankings and bad rankings. No rankings isn't a live option, any more than having Spider-Man rank all the departments. So if you signed the October Statement because you think no rankings would be best, I hope you'll still talk to us about how to build good rankings.