MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--UPDATED

A couple of readers have pointed out that two of the ten papers chosen this year by the Philosopher's Annual are by faculty at Michigan, which by itself would not be notable since Michigan is a top department. The worry is that the winning papers were chosen by three Michigan graduate students, working together with philosopher Patrick Grim (Stony Brook), who has been involved with the Philosopher's Annual since the beginning, and has done a terrific job through the years. This, alas, has (as we say in the law) the "appearance of impropriety," even if the papers were wholly meritorious. To be clear, papers are suggested for inclusion by a few dozen nominating editors (of whom I am one), and the nominating editors also provide feedback on the papers nominated. But the final decisions are made, after intensive reading and discussion, by the Michigan graduate students, working with Professor Grim. My inclination is to think that papers by Michigan faculty should not be eligible for inclusion under these circumstances, given the clear risk of bias involved.

UPDATE: Professor Grim asked me to share this response to these concerns, which I am happy to do:

Because we worried about implicit bias, we began our deliberations this year by agreeing that authorship by a Michigan faculty member should be treated as a presumptive mark against inclusion. Only truly exceptional virtues in other regards were to be taken as outweighing that negative presumption. In the cases at issue we decided that higher bar was actually met. We allow the pieces in question to speak for themselves. For many years we excluded Michigan faculty as nominating editors, but eventually decided that blanket policy was depriving us of important expertise. We feel a blanket policy against articles by Michigan faculty would similarly compromise the goal of the Philosopher’s Annual—selection each year of ten exceptional pieces, of particular interest and importance, regardless of authorship, affiliation, or place of original publication.

I'm not sure this is responsive to the worry. All these decisions (about "exceptional virtues" and what constitutes the "higher bar") are being made by graduate students at Michigan,whose professional futures depend on the faculty whose work they are evaluating. Professor Grim is the only independent counterweight in the mix, but he is but one of four final decision-makers, the others being the Michigan grad students.