Helen Redman

“The hardest thing in the world for a university is to start from not-so-good and upgrade.”

One of the literature professors at UCSD likes to tell this story. He thought the local university was very good when he arrived here thirteen years ago, but within a few years, two of his literary colleagues had been raided by Harvard, one was lured away by Yale, and another two left for Stanford. Despite those losses, the UCSD literature department aggressively recruited replacements. And last year one of its senior faculty members turned down an offer from Harvard; this year another spurned an offer from Stanford.

Stan Chodorow: "Revelle went out and hired eight chemists, every one of whom was already in or soon to be in the National Academy of Sciences." And in physics Revelle did the same thing.

Paul Stachelek

“The faculty members are still in the same league — but now they’re staying,” says the professor. “Ten or eleven years ago, they might have gone. And furthermore, people are leaving the top schools to come here.”

This particular professor is one of those who believe UCSD already has risen to rank among the top twenty universities in the nation — and will soon rank even higher, mentioned in the same breath with Harvard, Yale, or Stanford.

Roy Ritchie: "Maybe if we offered Kuhn half the Pacific Ocean and two-thirds of La Jolla, he would come here."

Paul Stachelek

Like any prediction, some people quibble with that forecast, but virtually everyone on the San Diego campus seems to agree that its accuracy depends most vitally on this arcane process of faculty recruitment.

Biologist Don Helinski: "Most superstars are pretty content where they are."

Paul Stachelek

“Universities are in a world not dissimilar to the world of the early Germanic tribes,” asserts Stan Chodorow, UCSD’s dean of arts and humanities. “It’s an honor world, in which everything we do — particularly in retaining and recruiting our faculty — is tied to our reputation. We lose one; it goes down. We win one; it goes up. It’s a world in which reputation is all.”

Pat Churchland, Philip Kitcher, Paul Churchland, Patricia Kitcher. The Churchlands were recruited under a special procedure known as a “target of opportunity’’ recruitment.

Paul Stachelek

Every sports page in the country shouts the news when a major baseball star changes teams. But how many people in San Diego are aware of the five heavy hitters snared by UCSD’s department of philosophy within the past three years? Who’s heard about the superstar of Asian economics who just defected from the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., to join UCSD’s new Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies? Who’s heard about the disastrous loss the psychology department is about to suffer with the upcoming departure to Stanford of one of its leading cognitive scientists? And yet, in this day when the presence of a major university can boost the economy of an entire region, UCSD’s recruiting victories and defeats have a greater financial impact on the lives of San Diegans than anything the Padres do. Certainly the faculty recruitment process is a complex and esoteric one, but it’s also dramatic. Though these academicians may dress in tweeds and silks, though they may never dirty their fingers with anything other than the ribbon for their computer printers, they use the most potent, even violent, language to discuss the business of hiring more of their own — they use the language of marauding.

One of the things that makes the process hard for outsiders to grasp is the dual nature of the world’s most prestigious universities. Their function is not only to teach; if it were, the process of hiring faculty would be much simpler. The best universities would be those that assemble the best teachers to deliver the desired product, that is, good teaching. But although all the best universities in this country profess to care about having good teachers, they also care at least as much about being major research centers. That is, they want everyone to recognize them as being places where the frontiers of human knowledge — knowledge about everything from French literature to particle physics — is being expanded at the most spectacular rates. That recognition is crucial, because it’s what perpetuates any institution’s status. Every year, for example, the smartest young would-be sociology professors go ask their faculty advisors where the best graduate sociology programs in the country are. At the moment, the advisors would be likely to name the universities of Chicago, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Those schools will then get the largest number of students wanting doctorates in sociology, applicants from whom the departments can pick the very best. Those graduate students, along with the professorial stars who attracted them, then are poised to win research funding and produce more books and papers that will dazzle other people in the discipline. But it’s the senior professors’ names — their reputations — that are the central magnets.

“The hardest thing in the world for a university is to start from not-so-good and upgrade,” says Peter Gourevitch, dean of UCSD’s new graduate school for Pacific Basin studies. “Or take a department which has sunk. The University of Pennsylvania has a very bad political science department. It’s very hard to improve that.” No professor will want to be the first luminary to risk going in and trying to restore a department’s former glory, Gourevitch says. He says he admires the UCSD faculty members “who came here twenty-five years ago, when this was sand.” But even they were joining the University of California; the San Diego campus may have been brand new, but it nonetheless included the venerable Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Chodorow points out.

“The second thing is that you had probably one of the great university builders in the modern period at work in Roger Revelle. The man was a brilliant recruiter. He had vision. He had personal force. The closest thing that academia has to charisma, he’s got. He’s a man who commands respect both because of his vision and his innovative ideas, and because he’s just fabulously smart. And he persuaded the president of the university to allow him to build a university from the top down. He went out and hired eight chemists, every one of whom was already in or soon to be in the National Academy of Sciences.” Chodorow says this was simply not done at the time, but it’s why UCSD became renowned so fast, and in physics Revelle did the same thing. “He started with the sciences because he could attract scientists and he could judge scientists, being one himself.”

This tack of recruiting senior faculty with national reputations is an expensive way to build, Chodorow points out, but the great attraction of winning academic stars is that they have track records. “You know what you’re buying,” and that’s particularly crucial in the humanities, Chodorow says. “A hot young historian hardly exists. You can make a guess to the person who’s going to be a reasonably good historian, but it takes a long time to become a good historian.” One or two senior heavyweights in a field, in contrast, can give a department national distinction overnight. But such people by definition already are established in well paying jobs, with lifetime tenure. They own houses, have children in school. These days they often have spouses with substantial careers of their own, frequently in academia. To recruit one is “a delicate dance,” in the words of Roy Ritchie.

At the moment, Ritchie is still engaged in the tricky steps involved in UCSD’s pursuit of a distinguished historian of science. A professor of American history, Ritchie was appointed chairman of the search committee set up to scout for such a person.

Why a historian of science? Ritchie explains that this position has been at the top of the department’s “wish list” for many years. Years ago UCSD did recruit a historian of science from St. John's College in Annapolis, but that man had found himself hankering to return to the small college system, and he returned to St. John's in the early 1970s. In subsequent years, the department had won historians with other specialties and had developed certain areas recognized to be exceptionally strong. For example, “We have something on the order of five Latin Americanists,” Ritchie says. “Most [history] departments at most have two. But for us, it’s a major item. We’re not likely to add another Latin Americanist for quite a while because we’ve got a very exceptional group.” On the deficit side, the twenty-nine-member department has no permanent specialist on Middle Eastern history. It has only one person who studies Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; only one who does research on Africa. It had no Japanese historian until last year, when it scored a great coup by raiding from the University of Wisconsin a man named John Dower, widely hailed as being one of the finest Japanese historians in the country. But the department still has no historians of science, and this year it decided to try to remedy that.

University departments don’t simply expand at will. All doubtless would like to; the more professors it has, the more powerful and influential a department is likely to be. But even during a boom such as the one UCSD is experiencing right now, it has been recruiting only about forty faculty members per year, just fifteen or so of whom are in new slots (twenty-five or so positions per year are typically vacated through retirements, deaths, and outside raids). A department must sell the administration on its worthiness in order to be awarded one of those coveted new spots. Ritchie indicates this wasn’t too difficult to do with a historian of science, since both Chodorow and Harold Ticho, the powerful vice chancellor of academic affairs, “are advocates of the history of science.” Both men had been deeply involved in recruiting the five senior philosophers of science who have joined the UCSD faculty in the past three years. “You don’t normally give a department those sorts of goodies” (such as the five new senior philosophers), Ritchie says. “So the very fact that they did indicated they wanted to make a major move in the area.” A historian of science could complement the philosophers of science very nicely, the administrators concurred.

Right from the outset, everyone agreed that the department should set its sights on a senior person. Ritchie explains that when starting a new program within a discipline, if one hires assistant professors before bringing in a senior scholar, one runs the risk of having the senior person declare that the junior faculty members’ work is insignificant and refuse to approve the young people’s tenure. “So it’s better to hire the distinguished full professor type who will then help you recruit the other people.”

Ritchie says he’s not sure exactly how many distinguished history of science professors there are in the United States — certainly fewer than fifty. “And the thing is, some of them are immovable.” One of the biggest names in the field, for example, is Thomas Kuhn, a man who twenty-five years ago electrified the discipline with the publication of a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. “It’d be folly for us to go after Kuhn,” Ritchie says. “He just left Princeton for MIT because he wanted to be in Boston. I don’t know — maybe if we offered Kuhn half the Pacific Ocean and two-thirds of La Jolla, he would come here, but that’s not a likely appointment. Or I. Bernard Cohen at Harvard. He’s just not going to move.”

So how do you know who might move? If they had been doing the search twenty-five years ago, Ritchie says the search committee members would have relied completely upon the legendary old boys’ network. Committee members would have called Kuhn and other big shots in the field to find out who else was worthy of pursuit and available. Today, such an approach would be illegal because of affirmative action requirements; universities must advertise most available jobs. Gourevitch in the Pacific Basin studies graduate school says, “The advertising has greatly changed the whole structure of recruiting.” It still doesn’t hurt if the relevant old boys’ network judges someone to be wonderful, “but advertising has changed the context in which that happens,” Gourevitch says. “One way of putting it is that it expands the old-boy network, because there are many other old boys who know the job is there. In the old days, somebody at Harvard would call up their friends at Yale and Princeton and Chicago and say, ‘We’ve got a job. Do you have any bright students?’ They may have also had a friend at Berkeley or someplace else who might have also had a bright student, but that friend might not even know the job existed.” Advertising increases that information flow, Gourevitch says.

So Ritchie’s committee advertised in the employment information bulletin of the American Historical Association. Despite its preference for a senior professor, the department announced it would also consider junior people. “We wanted to make an appointment,” Ritchie explains, and “you just never know what you’re going to get if you advertise only for a full professor.”

In addition to the ad, Ritchie did conduct some personal investigations. He made a point of having lunch, for example, with one acquaintance who is a historian of science at Caltech. “I said, ‘I want you to tell me about the field. What’s going on? Where’s the real cutting edge of the field?’ ” This particular friend told Ritchie he thought interest was going to shift into the Twentieth Century, with a lot of major work to be done in modern biology. Such an opinion is of limited value, Ritchie cautions. “He could be dead wrong. You also can get to the cutting edge, only to discover that that edge went so far and then stopped. It’s a real dicey business. Or you might have the opportunity of getting somebody in twentieth-century biology who’s not as bright as somebody who’s working on Copernicus. And frankly, I’d rather have the bright person. You start juggling a lot of balls. If you get the chance of picking up the most brilliant person doing twentieth-century biology, terrific! But the year you’re searching, that might not happen.”

Finally, the search committee also sent out letters to the nation’s top-rated history of science programs, asking for recommendations. Ritchie says the responses to those letters provide clues to the myriad reasons a senior professor might want to leave his existing post, from the most personal — divorce — to the most institutional — lack of support.

Money also can be a factor. Comparative salary levels between major universities can shift from one year to the next, but to keep track of how its salaries rank, UCSD compares itself against a pool of seven other research universities including Stanford, Yale, and the University of Michigan. Several years ago, toward the end of Governor Jerry Brown’s administration, UC salaries had sunk to the bottom third of the list — a development that faculty members say made recruiting much more difficult, particularly in the engineering school, where private industry was offering such attractive salaries to engineers with bachelors’ degrees that few students opted to go on to do graduate work. Governor George Deukmeijian’s championship of higher education has changed things; professors’ salaries jumped about thirteen percent one year, followed by another substantial raise, so that UCSD’s salaries currently rank about one to one and a half percent above the median salaries in the comparison group. “We are competitive,” says Chodorow, though he adds that upper-level salaries for full professors have been climbing so rapidly nationwide that the UC schools are quickly falling behind in that subcategoty (Annual pay for full professors at UCSD ranges up to $71,200, though some “above-scale” scholars are paid as much as $80,000. At the other end of the scale, the starting pay for an assistant professor at UCSD is $29,800.)

All schools don’t pay that well. “The whole Midwest is not doing very well financially,” Ritchie says. “The state legislatures are strapped for money. There are a lot of terrific people in the Big Ten schools, and some of them are really suffering. And so it’s possible to go off and raid in the Midwest where you can make a substantial salary offer” — perhaps as much as $20,000 or $30,000 more than the target’s current salary. Great Britain under the Thatcher government is also a fertile hunting ground, he says.

But the high cost of housing in Southern California further complicates the process, everyone agrees. Chodorow elaborates, “Very often you take somebody out of the Midwest, to give an example. He sells a beautiful house on two acres of land for eighty or ninety thousand dollars, and he comes here. His standard of living is going to be severely affected. It may wipe him out. It may set him back so that the relation of his mortgage payments to his income is like it was when he was twenty-eight or thirty-two.” To help offset the problem, the university has a faculty mortgage program in which UCSD can provide up to $150,000 for slightly lower interest rates than the prevailing market mortgage rates; only a limited number of such mortgages are available in any given year, however, and top administrators exercise the sole control over them, wielding them as crucial bargaining chips.

At one time, the cost of housing was the greatest impediment in the recruiting process, but now professors seem as likely as not to single out another problem: the phenomenon of two-career couples. “In the old days, the little wifey would probably subvert her career to the great scholar,” says Ritchie. Now that’s the case much less often. One administrator says, “One of the first things we do when we begin a recruitment is to ask, what does your spouse do? If we don’t bring it up, they do.” In some cases, the spouse may be creating the potential for recruitment; he or she may want to leave a small town where job opportunities are limited. “All over the country there are people moving around because the spouse is unhappy,” the administrator says. But when both spouses are professors, the pairing can make recruiting just that much stickier. When both are brilliant, highly distinguished scholars, the university that wins them both with one stroke actually benefits from their marital union. But what of the great man who declares that part of the “deal” required to move him is a faculty slot for his young, not-so-distinguished second wife?

Ritchie says a more subtle spousal dilemma arose in the search for a history of science professor. One extremely promising prospect unearthed by the search had a husband who was applying for another job within the history department. But when Ritchie checked with the chairman of the other search committee, he was told that the husband was “maybe in the top ten” but unlikely to advance beyond that. “So we just dropped it,” says Ritchie.

By last fall, about forty people had applied for the job, and by January Ritchie and the other search committee member had winnowed them down to three senior scholars, all of whom were apparently serious about a possible move. How does one judge the sincerity of such people’s interest? Ritchie says, “The thing is, when you’re in a major research university, everyone’s plugged into a world. This January I was on a fellowship prize committee for which I read fourteen dissertations. I went from doing that to being on a grants-in-aid committee for the American Council of Learned Societies, and I read a hundred applications. Then I got together with five people in New York, and we spent a day together. You gossip.”

To illustrate what a small world academia can be, Ritchie offers this anecdote. One of his committee’s top choices had chosen not to tell his department he was being recruited (a somewhat unusual move, since recruitment normally enhances one’s reputation). “This happened to be a department where I have a good friend. I said nothing to the friend. But he’s one of the people I saw when I was in New York. And he said, ‘I hear you’re going after so-and-so.’ I said, ‘How do you know that?’ And he said, ‘Everyone in the department knows. He hasn’t told the department, but we all know it.’ I said, ‘How’d you find out?’ He said, ‘We’ve got networks that are every bit as good as yours.’ There are very, very extensive gossip networks.”

This past January, the top three history of science candidates all came to La Jolla for one of the latter stages of the recruitment ritual. “They trot out their intellectual goods in a seminar,” Ritchie says. Although the seminars usually consist of an hour-long presentation, candidates typically stay in town for two or three days, breakfasting, lunching, and dining with as many existing department members as possible, each side circling and sniffing at each other. A critical judgment hangs in the balance. All three separate meetings with the eminent historians of sciences went well, Ritchie says. But then the recruitment took an unexpected turn.

Two of the three men being recruited — Martin Rudwick at Princeton and Robert Westman of UCLA — began talking to each other over the phone. “Sometimes you know who the other people [being considered for a position] are; sometimes you don’t,” Ritchie says. “You can usually find out through whatever gossip network you want to consult.” These two had met years before at Cambridge, and their fields were quite far apart; Rudwick is a world authority on nineteenth-century geology, while Westman specializes in studying the scientific revolution. Yet they shared close general intellectual interests. “And then,” Ritchie continues, “they sort of informed the department that they would be interested in coming together.” This was an dizzying prospect. “Certainly if you want to say, ‘We’re going to do history of science,’ these two guys would be a spectacular catch.” Rudwick in particular is a world-class luminary, author of a recent book called The Great Devonian Controversy, which has been called a “masterpiece” by renowned Harvard scientist Stephen J. Gould.

So back to the administration the committee went, to pitch for an additional senior faculty slot. “All the departments want more,” Ritchie says. “And [vice chancellor] Ticho’s the one who has to determine what’s best for UCSD, not just for the history department or the history of science or anyone else.” In this case, confronted with arguments that the acquisition of these two luminaries would create “an instant history and philosophy of science program,” Ritchie says Ticho “gave us the hunting licenses for both.”

Next the entire history department had to vote — another crucial checkpoint in the process. “If you bring in a new faculty member, it’s like adding a new member to the family. You will permanently change the character of your department,” says philosophy department chairman Paul Churchland. Another professor adds, “In some departments, there will be lively and passionate debates about a given candidate, and in other departments it will be much more civilized. Some departments have a reputation for being a bit contentious and cantankerous in discussing their own appointments.” This man says debates most often have to do with ideology, “in the sense of how they happen to view the world.” As one example, he mentions one UCSD engineering professor who espouses some unorthodox theories about turbulence. “I suspect if some people were to try to appoint him at other schools around this country, he’d have a hard time — because his theories go against the generally accepted notions. That’s what I call ideological.”

Churchland explains, “Academics like to be validated in the work that they’re doing, or the research they’re pursuing, or the particular school of their field — by having further people brought in who share the same interests, the same values; people who will show an interest in their work, from whom they can draw. They won’t want somebody who’s in a distant field in the same discipline, who won’t ever do them any good. So it’s always a bit of a competition. Everybody wants new playmates.”

In the case of the new potential history playmates, Ritchie says the departmental vote- brought unanimous approval. Yet the process still wasn’t complete. For every candidate approved by a department, a faculty-wide committee reviews the candidates still further, and for tenured positions, this committee consults with yet another ad hoc committee usually composed of specialists in the relevant field. Although most of the recommendations for change relate to the salary level at which a given department is proposing to hire someone, biologist Doug Smith, the committee chairman, says sometimes the committee completely rejects a candidate. This level of bureaucracy is just one more check and balance, Smith says, designed to prevent such possibilities as that of the powerful department head who bullies his colleagues into approving some hand-picked favorite. Fifth College Provost James Lyon, a former member of the committee, says he once saw such a thing happen when he taught as a junior faculty member at Harvard. “I saw a faculty member there who managed to convince the dean and the administration that this person who was a friend of his was really important for their program. And they brought him, and he was so mediocre, and also arrogant. And the result of this was that three faculty members resigned their positions and left Harvard over the next five years because they couldn’t stand him. That kind of loss is incalculable! You can perpetuate a buddy system that builds mediocrity into it.”

The two historians of science are expected to win approval of the committee sometime between now and the middle of June. And then one of the most delicate phases of the courtship will remain: the detailed negotiations between UCSD and the two objects of its desire. Beyond the straightforward salary, Ritchie says, “There are goodies that can be sent to any faculty member.” These may be laboratory space or computers or mortgage money. Stan Chodorow, the arts and humanities dean, says senior people usually won’t move “unless they’re certain they’ll get the opportunity to build something. They want other faculty positions committed to their area.” These crucial assurances are never written; they’re a matter of honor.

This is the only practical approach to a very complex relationship, Chodorow asserts. “The university, for example, is going to say to somebody, ‘If you come here and you’re as good as we think you are, and you are productive, and you attract graduate students, and undergraduates come to your courses, then we’re going to throw good money after good.’ The person who’s coming says to himself, ‘I am that good. I will attract the graduate students. I will be productive. Of course they’re going to do everything that is possible to really keep me here and enhance my academic area.’ ” But lots of things can disrupt that chain of events, Chodorow says. “The person could get here and get sick. The person can get here and discover the beach. The person can get here, and the [research] problem he’s working on is solved. And then he’s sort of lost and doesn’t know what to do. Or his marriage breaks up and he gets unhappy and doesn’t really work for three to five years.’’

Negotiations with junior faculty members, fresh out of graduate school or postdoctoral positions, usually are less complex, Chodorow says. But that doesn’t mean bright young assistant professors always leap in response to a snap from the La Jolla university’s collective fingers, as one current example in the biology department illustrates. That department has long ranked as one of UCSD’s most prestigious. Molecular biologist Don Helinski says a survey carried out by the National Academy of Sciences a few years back “clearly placed it in the top ten biology departments in the country. Some people say it’s number one; some people say it’s number seven or eight. But it’s in the top ten, which is about as precise as you can be” about this sort of thing, Helinski contends. That kind of stature means UCSD’s biology department always is competing for young professors against such institutions at MIT, Yale, the University of Chicago, and Berkeley. That kind of competition can significantly frustrate a search such as the department’s current hunt for a plant biologist.

Helinski served on the committee that searched for such a person — a task that began three years ago. The first year, the committee offered the position to a young woman who wound up choosing another offer from Berkeley. The committee tried again last year, but its top candidate waivered before finally deciding to take a job with the United States Department of Agriculture. That year the committee had an alternative candidate whom the committee members really liked but who was rejected by the department members overall. Again the search lurched to a halt. This year, however, the committee came up with three excellent candidates, one from the University of Washington in Seattle, one from Duke University, and one from MIT. The department as a whole also liked all three and is currently negotiating to hire two of them.

In this department — indeed in all UCSD’s natural science departments — recruitment of junior faculty members is the rule, something Helinski readily explains. “We already have a lot of prestige at the senior level.” As one indicator, the biology department includes more than a half-dozen people who are members of the elite National Academy of Sciences, whereas “many campuses would give their right arm to have just one,” Helinski says. “That doesn’t mean we would reject a superstar who expressed an interest in coming to the department. But we have found that most superstars are pretty content where they are, and it’s extremely difficult to dislodge them.”

“The stars elevate your reputation, but you have to be a little selective in the sense that the future also depends on your young people,” says chemistiy department chairman Kurt Shuler. “You sciousness also ought to understand the human brain. So she began attending classes at the University of Manitoba’s medical school and immersed herself in hands-on neuroscientific research, a move that proved so exciting that her husband eventually also worked in one of the neurophysiological research labs. “If I had been at a place where I’d been expected to produce like mad and to produce very conventional stuff, then I expect I never would have made the switch,’’ she says. “As it was, they [the administration] pretty much left me alone. Nobody said, ‘Well, you won’t get tenure if you do this, or you won’t get promoted because you won’t have papers out.’ They left me to do what I wanted to do.’’

Paul Churchland says the work in neuroscience “changed our view of how we should be doing things like epistemology and theory of cognition.’’ When the Churchlands began publishing their new-found insights, their work gained them international respect. In fact, Chodorow says the couple was recruited under a special procedure known as a “target of opportunity’’ recruitment; this means UCSD didn’t even have to advertise for applications from other people before hiring the Churchlands, the couple was recognized as being so identifiably superior.

Along with the Churchlands, the department also hired a young philosopher of biology from Princeton named Lisa Lloyd. So although the department also simultaneously lost its existing philosopher of science (who wanted to return to Chicago and for that reason took a job at the University of Illinois), it suddenly had a very respectable philosophy of science department. When it won permission in the spring of 1986 to expand again, the department wasn’t even particularly looking for more philosophers of science. Church-land says it just turned out, providentially, that three senior people who all had weighty credentials in other areas of philosophy and were ready to leave current positions also were all eminent philosophers of science. One was Stephen Stich, a University of Maryland professor whose work focused on the philosophy of language and applied ethics, as well as the philosophy of mind. The other two, through a notable coincidence, also happened to be a married couple, Philip and Patricia Kitcher, who had three years previously taken senior posts at the University of Minnesota.

Philip in fact had been hired to build up that university’s once-prestigious philosophy of science center. And he had succeeded in winning a huge National Endowments for the Humanities grant to organize a year-long institute that brought to the Minnesota campus twenty-five of the most renowned philosophers of science in the world. But in their second year in Minneapolis, the couple had become aware of long-smoldering intra-departmental squabbling that they began to fear might jeopardize the growth of the philosophy of science program.

Despite that, Philip says he and his wife thought long and hard about leaving. They worried about the quality of schools in San Diego; they knew they would miss the rich cultural life in Minneapolis. And “the administration would have done anything to get us to stay,’’ Phillip says. When university administrators learned the couple was thinking of leaving, “they offered us our own mini-empire,’’ Philip says, including salaries to match anything UCSD offered, plus an extra $20,000 per year to be spent on travel and any academic program they wanted, plus' fellowships to bring in any graduate students they wanted. “And if there was anything else we wanted, we could take it up with the vice chancellor for academic affairs.” On his way to Europe, the president of the University of Minnesota called to urge the Kitchers to ask for their hearts’ desire.

But given the bitter politicking within the University of Minnesota department and the intellectual prospects at UCSD, the couple decided that a move was simply irresistible. Besides the lure of the other philosophers of science who had been newly recruited by UCSD, the local campus held special attractions for Patricia, a noted Kant scholar as well as a philosopher of psychology. She says she was drawn both by UCSD’s wonderful cognitive psychologists and by the philosophy department’s two renowned Kant scholars (including Henry Allison, recognized to be the premier Kant scholar in the United States because of a book Allison wrote called Kant's Transcendental Idealism). “There is no better place on earth to work on Kant and the philosophy of psychology than UCSD,” says Patricia Kitcher. Although they only arrived this past fell, she says the couple already has had calls from other universities to see if they’re “ ‘movable’... And we’re not, because this is best place,” she adds.

With them, the Kitchers brought three graduates students; Stich brought one from Maryland. But perhaps the most dramatic indication in the rise of the status of UCSD’s philosophy department is the number of applications from new graduate students. In the last year alone, these have increased from about fifty to at least 120. “And my guess is that’s not the end of it,” says Stich. “I would guess that the number will double again next year.” Stich says although UCSD’s philosophy department wouldn’t previously have been ranked among the top ten in the country, the next time such a ranking is done, “it sure as heck will be.”

UCSD’s doctorate program in philosophy in fact was rated in thirty-first place by the last such major study. Conducted in 1980 by the Associated Research Councils (an entity that includes such lofty organizations as the National Academy of Sciences), the most attention-grabbing part was a “reputational” survey in which scholars all over the country were asked to give a numerical rating to all the graduate programs in their particular disciplines. When the rankings given to the faculty in all its graduate programs are averaged, UCSD’s offerings placed eighteenth in the country overall. Interestingly, that’s the very same ranking given UCSD’s overall graduate instruction by a private organization based in Northridge, California, that publishes The Gourman Report evaluations of both undergraduate and graduate schools. This organization in 1985 rated UCSD’s undergraduate program even higher: thirteenth in the United States after Princeton, Harvard, Michigan (Ann Arbor), Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Cornell, Chicago, the University of Wisconsin (Madison), UCLA, MIT, and Caltech.

That was one of three “consumerist” ratings published in 1985, and provost James Lyon says UCSD was the only one that appeared in the top twenty of all three. Lyon is also quick to mention the high number of Nobel Prize winners associated with the faculty, along with the number of Guggenheim fellows and the large concentrations of members of such organizations as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences or the International Academy of Astronautics. “These are the gauges by which one rates excellence,” Lyon states. Another gauge is the amount of federal research and development dollars received, a competition in which UCSD has rated high for many years (eighth in the country in 1984-85). And the local university’s officials assert that the quality of both undergraduates and graduates has been steadily increasing. As one measure of that, UCSD graduate students’ average GRE scores now rank second in the UC system only to Berkeley’s. Says one administrator, “We’re at least as selective as Berkeley in terms of the percentage of graduate applications we receive compared to the number of graduate students admitted.” Among undergraduates, the median grade-point average has risen from 3.43 in 1983 to 3.66 last fall; SAT scores have climbed from 1054 four years ago to 1073, and provost Tom Bond predicts the median SAT score will reach 1100 this year. Bond says UCSD is even prouder of a 1985 report that looked at the percentage of American undergraduates who go on to receive doctoral degrees. UCSD ranked tenth in the country and was the only public school listed among the top twenty.

It adds up to a substantial body of evidence to support the contention of those like Chodorow who say the local university already stands among the nation’s very top schools in some ways and in other areas will continue to climb fast. Chodorow says, “For example, political science is a brand-new PhD program, so it hasn’t gotten any reputation really as a graduate program. However, everywhere I go in the country, people tell me I’ve got the best department in political science in the country.’’ He says that’s based on what UCSD’s political scientists are writing and the role they’re playing in the Field. “And so the graduate program is likely to come out of the ground very, very fast.”

Being on the very top “is not only a matter of being good. It’s being good in so many fields that everybody notices. To a certain extent, it is size-related,” Chodorow says. Continued growth should help boost the school’s climb, he predicts. And with more successes in the recruiting wars, he says, “The real result is to create an intellectual community which is better or more exciting to be in. There’s more things going on. There are more smart people saying interesting things. And more people want to come here to give lectures. That’s what makes a great university. You don’t quantify it, but you know when you have it.”