“Is there a method to cut back the obsession over rankings in our self-discipline?”
That’s the opening query of a reader’s message presently below dialogue at The Philosophers’ Cocoon.
[from Color Numeral Series (1969) by Jasper Johns]
My response was: haven’t we?
After I suppose again to 10 or twenty years in the past plainly concern about rankings was rather more intense and widespread than it’s now. Again then, rankings could be introduced up routinely as one thing to be thought-about in lots of sorts of selections a person or a division may make (for example), and even when not explicitly talked about they appeared essential to bear in mind.
These days, such rankings (each departmental and journal rankings are talked about by the author) appear much less essential. That’s to not say they will’t be helpful. However we appear much less obsessive about them. Maybe that there’s now, greater than ever earlier than, a better quantity of simply accessible details about the career, departments, journals, and particular person philosophers, and that there are extra out there metrics and measures, diminishes the extent to which anyone rating looms everpresently massive in our ideas.
Or is it simply me? I’m getting older, and it’s regular as one ages to care much less about what “everybody” thinks (and rankings are one try at representing that). I’m not a graduate scholar or early profession thinker, for whom rankings could be extra important. Moreover, I could be biased on this query, given one of many causes for creating Each day Nous within the first place (if you understand, you understand—I don’t really feel like moving into it).
I think about some disagree, and that some suppose the query too broad. I’m curious to listen to what you suppose. (Maybe it will be particularly useful to listen to from those that, a decade or two again, have been already fairly senior within the career.) Remark right here or on the Cocoon (or each).
(I ought to observe that the subject right here is philosophy-specific rankings. I don’t imply to be referring to common rankings just like the REF within the UK, or US Information & World Report rankings.)
