<p>Interesting assessment of undergraduate work from this philosopher:</p>
<p>"Texas faculty did undergraduate work at Yale (4), Princeton (3), Haverford, Drew , Cal Tech, Missouri , Michigan State , Brown, UVA, and Columbia , among other places. There are eminent philosophers--who have held or now hold tenured posts at top ten departments--who did their undergraduate work at the University of New Mexico, Queens College (New York), and the University of Pittsburgh. It is possible to get good philosophical training in many undergraduate settings.</p>
<p>"High school students interested in philosophy would do best to identify schools that have strong reputations for undergraduate education first. Only then, should they look in to the quality of the philosophy department. Some ranked PhD programs have good reputations for undergraduate education, like Princeton , Yale, Brown and Rice, among many others. The larger universities (like Harvard or Michigan or Texas ) tend to offer a more mixed undergraduate experience, largely due to their size. Since much of the teaching at those institutions will be done by graduate students, it pays to go to a school with a strong PhD program, since that will affect the intellectual caliber of teachers you will encounter."</p>
<p>Well, I think this "ranking" is a reference for people who would be studying philosophy specifically at Harvard with the intent of pursuing a doctoral degree in the field, and not necessarily advice for the public at large.
Sure, the Department may generally employ great philosophers - Hilary Putnams and WVO Quines - but it is quite possible (more likely, than say, at Princeton) that you may not get the attention needed to furnish a competitive graduate school application for philosophy at Harvard. When instruction and grading are done by teaching fellows, students simply do not develop the strong relationships they do when working closely with a professor. The results are less personal and less cogent letters of recommendation. Also, in philosophy PhD admissions, the writing sample is extremely important. This, too, requires fairly close work with a faculty member to create a top-tier piece. Leiter seems to have the age-old idea that training in philosophy requires dialectic, and that this formative mechanism may be lacking, or less prevalent at larger schools.</p>
<p>As an aside, I think he is entirely wrong in regards to Harvard. Harvard's undergraduate philosophy program seems to explicitly encouarge this kind of exchange, mandating small, professor led seminars. You may not find yourself shooting the breeze with Stanley Cavell, but I do not think this criticism is particularly applicable to students at Harvard, who will be primarily enrolled in philosophy courses.</p>
<p>This may have been more a general comment about the overall Harvard environment than specifically about being an undergraduate philosophy concentrator. Considering that Harvard has approximately one faculty member in philosophy for each student receiving a degree in that field, the impersonal education of which Harvard is so often accused hardly seems to fit.</p>