Sunday through Tuesday I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to visit the Department of Philosophy. According to the rankings, this is one of the top five departments in the English-speaking world, in addition to being of world class in the specific area of decision theory and rational choice. My visit consisted of a quiet Sunday afternoon that I used to walk around the place for a bit, a dinner party at Professor Tappenden’s house and then two densely scheduled days of lectures, seminars, one-on-ones with professors and hanging out with grad students.
In my area of interest, the two senior figures here are Jim Joyce and Allan Gibbard. My first meeting with Professor Gibbard, probably the most famous person I’m meeting on this tour, was at Professor Tappenden’s house on Sunday night. This turned into a fairly surreal experience as we only talked about sports without mentioning our common philosophical interests.
Jim and Allan were both very friendly and I would be very excited to work with them. Jim extensively complimented my own work and made it clear he would do everything in his power to get me off the waitlist for financial support. We talked quite extensively about his thoughts on imprecise credences and on expected utility theory. Regarding the latter, he tends to be of the opinion that most of the supposed counterexamples to EUT are actually bad experimental setups where the subjects’ beliefs about what is going on do not sufficiently match what the experimenters want them to believe to warrant the conclusions they draw. Most philosophers would disagree, I think, but it seems worthwhile to me to pursue this position and see where it leads us.
When asked about the other places I’m interested in, Jim made it clear he thinks highly of UPenn, LSE, Missouri-Columbia and CMU. A worry about CMU might be, according to him, that grad students often get towed into professors’ research projects to the extent where they find it hard or impossible to explore an interest outside a professor’s immediate project. A worry about UPenn and Mizzou would be that they have only one professor at each of these places that would be a natural dissertation adviser for me.
Jim also mentioned two or three junior professors who share my interests. I met one of them, Sarah Moss, who gave a special seminar on formal epistemology and a regular seminar on analytic philosophy that I both attended. She is easily among the best teachers of philosophy I have ever met. Gaining the opportunity to work with her would be a big attraction of this place.
This is the largest department on my tour so far (and I think overall as well) with faculty numbering in the upper twenties and grad students in the low thirties. As such all of the philosophical bases are covered in this department, and most of them excellently so. Out of all the places I’m considering, this one presumably has the best overall education in philosophy and the associated job market advantages.
Ann Arbor is a strong university in many areas. Through the Decision Consortium, an interdisciplinary research seminar organized weekly, I will be able to get in touch with other scientists interested in similar topics. For some reason, at this place these people will be from the psychology and medicine departments more often than the economics department. My overall impression is that UPenn scores at least as well in this regard.
Teaching requirements amount to about half of the total number of semesters one is expected to be in the program. This includes TA-ing and grading in the second and third year, and a chance to act as a lead instructor later on.
Course requirements take up most of the first two years, with two courses outside the department required, but outside courses generally can’t count for philosophy credit. Distribution requirements amount to one ancient and one modern history class, one ethics, two in distinct areas of M&E (metaphysics and epistemology) and one either in a further M&E topic or in a distinct area of ethics. In addition there is a logic requirement, the “cognate” (outside) requirements, a proseminar in the first year and a language requirement.
The funding package is upwards of $20,000 per year and was considered by grad students to be more than sufficient. In principle it is the same for everyone. One worry that was raised is that as an international student I might end up in a substantially higher tax bracket. This mystified me as I have heard nothing about this at any of the schools I have visited so far, despite taxes coming up explicitly at CMU when I asked about it.
The grad student offices are a large room in the same hallway that all the professors are in. The workspaces themselves are cubicles within that room. The Department is located at the front of a nice large building called Angell Hall (see picture). Almost all of the grad students live within a twenty minute walk in this relatively small university town (~100,000 pop).
Jim and Allan have about three and about six students that they are advising respectively. They can get rather busy, but are always willing to make an appointment if you email them, or so the grad students tell me. The relations among the faculty seem to be quite good in general.
As at Penn, there was some ambiguity about publications. Apparently the bigger schools in the US tend not to view publishing your work as hugely important and even potentially disadvantageous for grad students (when you publish something “immaturely” it might “haunt” you later on). Some students therefore only publish (parts of) their dissertation after graduating.
Expense accounts are available for visiting conferences, and students generally attend a few conferences per year. When you’re on fellowship (i.e. no teaching) you are also free to spend more substantial amounts of time elsewhere.
That concludes my notes on Ann Arbor. Let’s see what Wisconsin-Madison has to offer.
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