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APA Strengthens Anti-Discrimination Stance

Brian Leiter

Via Mark Lance, I learn that the APA has strengthened its stance against institutions that discriminate based on sexual orientation, and will now decline to run job ads from institutions that do not affirm compliace with the anti-discrimination policy.  (The move to address discrimination based on sexual orientation began with an initiative by philosopher Charles Hermes posted on this blog in 2009.)  Given that such discrimination is widely sanctioned by many religious denominations, and thus probably infects hiring at institutions affiliated with those denominations, this seems certain to exclude some non-trivial number of schools from advertising through JFP.  Am I wrong?  Comments from faculty at institutions likely to be affected would be welcome.  As usual, signed comments will be very strongly preferred.

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17 responses to “APA Strengthens Anti-Discrimination Stance”

  1. Matt Drabek

    It seems like the easiest way to estimate how many schools will be affected would be by counting the number of flagged ads from the last few JFPs. If I recall, that was a pretty small number.

    Reply
  2. Mark Murphy

    Well, at least those that have had flagged ads. I am not sure how to understand the new requirement, which precludes institutions from advertising in JFP that will not 'commit themselves to complying with' the antidiscrimination policy. Does that mean (1) commit, in the search for which the institution is currently advertising, to follow the policy, or (2) commit generally, for the current search and other foreseeable searches, to follow the policy? If it is the latter, then there may be many more schools who cannot make that commitment. Georgetown, for example, very occasionally does targeted searches for Jesuits. Jesuits must be male. These searches thus violate the APA's nondiscrimination rule, and so long as we at Georgetown are willing to do searches of that sort, we could not make a general commitment to follow the APA policy.

    Reply
  3. Kathryn J. Norlock

    Am I missing something, where does the quote about 'commit themselves' come from, Mark Murphy? I don't find language of commitment. “Institutions that seek to advertise in the JFP will be asked whether they comply with the APA Nondiscrimination Statement. Ads from those that do not so indicate will not be run.” So it's not a vague commitment. If you say that yes, you comply with it, then your ad runs.

    The Nondiscrimination Statement says "The American Philosophical Association rejects as unethical all forms of discrimination based on race, color, religion, political convictions, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, gender identification or age, whether in graduate admissions, appointments, retention, promotion and tenure, manuscript evaluation, salary determination, or other professional activities in which APA members characteristically participate."

    It seems evident to me — but maybe this is my Catholic upbringing biasing me — that searches for Jesuits on the part of a Jesuit institution is not a search "based on" sex. I know I'm appealing to double-effect here, but clearly the discrimination in favor of Jesuits on the basis of their Jesuit-ness (Jesuistry? guess my upbringing didn't take as well as I thought), in Georgetown's case, is not one of the 'unethical' sorts in the policy. Jesuits are inevitably male, but their maleness is not what makes them Jesuits. I'm not seeing the problem.

    Reply
  4. Mark Murphy

    The APA proceedings apparently includes the following language: "The Board passed a motion amending the APA Nondiscrimination Statement to disallow JFP advertising by institutions that would not commit themselves to complying with the Nondiscrimination Statement." But that may just be a misleading description of what was actually adopted. Still, even put as 'compliance with,' I would say that this admits of a broader and a weaker reading. In one very clear sense, GU does not comply with the APA discrimination policy.

    One thing that is clear from the earlier discussion of APA policy is that the double-effect-type distinction that you draw was not endorsed by the, shall we say, more vocal of the participants in that discussion.

    Reply
  5. Junior Philosopher

    1. As far as I can tell, Kathryn Norlock is right about Mark Murphy's phrasing. But the bit of the policy relevant to the point about Jesuits was the one that bars employing "criteria for … religious affiliation [that] discriminate against persons according to the other attributes listed in this statement" — this is what was supposed to rule out, e.g., an institution that insists on employing only those who endorse certain religious principles and then having as a side-effect of this insistence a bias against employing homosexuals. And MM's example has a similar structure: it seems to be a case that results in discrimination *according to* sex, even if the *basis* for the discrimination is something else.

    2. On the original question, I suspect the number of affected schools will be low as long as they are allowed to self-report. But if the APA goes the "full investigation" route described in the policy, then the number could be much higher: e.g. many religious institutions don't have policies in place that explicitly preclude employing homosexuals or transgendered persons as faculty members, but in practice their hiring and retention may be significantly biased against them. How often this needs to happen in order for an institution to run afoul of the APA's policy, and what the evidential standards are for determining when it has, are of course further matters.

    Reply
  6. Alastair Norcross

    Suppose I know that, as a matter of fact, everyone in the world with an AOS in the philosophy of X is female. If I want to hire someone with an AOS in the philosophy of X, I know that I will, in fact, only be looking at female applicants. But I won't necessarily fall foul of the APA policy. If a male philosopher were to acquire an AOS in the philosophy of X, I wouldn't rule him out of contention on the grounds that he's male. Is the Jesuit situation different? I'm not sure. It's certainly true that, as it stands, Jesuits don't just happen to be exclusively male. It's not just a matter of women not being interested in being Jesuits. But it's also true that Jesuits aren't necessarily male. After all, other Christian denominations have embraced female clergy. The Roman Catholic church will almost certainly do so too at some point, and might have already had they had more enlightened leadership.

    Reply
  7. David Sobel

    And if God came down tomorrow and said that homosexuality was no longer wrong …

    Reply
  8. God

    For the record, homsexuality is just fine with Me.

    Reply
  9. David Sobel

    🙂

    Reply
  10. John Schwenkler

    Even if the Catholic Church were to permit female clergy (which seems enormously unlikely imo), this would not in itself change the makeup of the Jesuits, which is not just a group of priests, but a religious society with its own constitution. Alternatively one could imagine a targeted search for Christian Brothers at La Salle.

    Reply
  11. Alastair Norcross

    John, you seem to have missed the point of my post.

    Reply
  12. Rebecca Kukla

    I think that Mark M's concern about the ambiguity is no so easily dismissed. I think the correct reading ought to be his (1) – That is, the commitment need only be for the search at hand. That takes care of worries like the Jesuit case he raised, which, on reading (2), don't seem to me to be so easily discharged as people are making out. Also (1) seems more plausible to me, because I don't see how a given search committee can really be in a position to vouch for a permanent and universal commitment on behalf of their institution. Finally and most importantly, the main point of the requirement seems to be to help ensure that particular job-seekers will not be discriminated against. It's of course also nice to know that you are joining an institution that never discriminates, but this seems to me to be a separate issue beyond the scope of the policy, or at least beyond the scope of what the policy should be. I haven't looked carefully at the policy language; I've just been following the blog chatter. But the APA might consider clarifying that (1) rather than (2) is what is meant, if this is indeed left ambiguous.

    Reply
  13. Mark Murphy

    Rebecca, there is a whole lot of space between 'for this search' and 'permanent and universal.' There is, for example, 'this is how we do things, and have no plans to change.'

    If dealing with this question involves appeals to double effect, counterfactuals about 'what if the Jesuits started allowing women' in order to make a distinction between what holds necessarily and what holds only contingently, and appeals to the 'legislative history' of this rule, well, that would be a little funny.

    Reply
  14. Rebecca Kukla

    Mark, I agree entirely, especially with your second paragraph (in 13). If you have to go through such contortions to deal with an everyday case, it's a problem with the policy. That's one reason why I think sticking to (1) is cleaner, and I think it has other advantages too. And while "this is how we do things…" is in between "for this search" and "permanent and universal" it seems to me to introduce messy room for interpretation.

    Reply
  15. Katy Abramson

    I think it would be useful here to separate some issues that I think are to some degree being implicitly tied to one another in ways that they are not in fact linked. The clarification in the APA's policy that followed the 2009 debates about whether to read the APA policy in a way that actually covered GLBTQ persons is not relevant to the question Murphy now raises about hiring Jesuits. The APA policy has, at least since I was first on the market in the late 1990s, always said that discrimination on the basis of sex violates the policy, has always said that it's not inconsistent with the APA policy that religious institutions are permitted to hire/show preference for members of that religion, provided that in doing so, they do not discriminate on the basis of any of the protected categories, including sex. Furthermore, the JFP has –again, at least since I've ever been on the market– always included a statement to the effect that the APA expects advertisers to be committed to the letter and spirit of the APAs non-discrimination statement. The 2009/2010 clarification of the APA policy which made it clear, contrary to folks like Mark Murphy [http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/murphym/APAStatement-Murphy.htm%5D that it actually *is* "beyond the pale" to fire, deny tenure, or refuse to hire, a philosopher because s/he is lbgtq, doesn't seem to me to change anything as far as concerns the question of whether targeted searches for Jesuits violate the APA policy.
    As for the question *now* being raised about hiring Jesuits: details? How does it work at Georgetown? Is it that there are targeted searches for only members of the order who are also philosophers? Or is it that special preference is given to Jesuits? Or is it that the university has special chairs for Jesuits, and individual departments compete to have their candidate chosen for that/those chairs?
    Suppose it were 1977, and BYU, and there were a targeted search were for only those who could hold priesthood office in the LDS. That search would violate the APAs policy on the grounds of both sex and race. Would you think okay? Would you think it okay if BYU only sometimes had job searches which discriminated against black people, and other times had open searches?

    Reply
  16. Mark Murphy

    What is new is the procedures that departments are expected to follow to be granted permission to advertise in JFP. While these were occasioned by the discussion concerning how the antidiscrimination policy should be administered with respect to sexual orientation, they apply more broadly than that. And how it is interpreted will make a difference to what departments can sign on. I use the GU case because it is an example familiar to me, not because I am asking for help on the casuistry.

    Reply
  17. Mark Murphy

    Also, clicking the link to the open letter about the APA nondiscrimination policy yields a file-not-found because the link incorporates the bracket at the end.

    Reply

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