APA pushes for hiring equality

The American Philosophical Association (APA) will censure universities that use sexual orientation as a basis for hiring decisions, philosophy professor and APA chair Kwame Anthony Appiah confirmed in an e-mail to The Daily Princetonian.

The policy, yet to be formally announced by the APA, would enforce the organization’s long-standing non-discrimination clause. The association recommends that all clients who use its Jobs for Philosophers job listing service adhere to this clause. Members of the philosophical community, including some at Princeton, have expressed great support for the policy, which has also sparked controversy because universities that object to homosexual practices on religious grounds will be flagged as discriminatory.

The APA allows universities to list job advertisements in its publication regardless of the institutions’ hiring based on religious affiliation.

Appiah explained that the APA’s current job search program distinguishes institutions inconsistent with the organization’s ethical standards or those of the American Association of University Professors. The new system will involve flagging institutions that violate the organization’s anti-discrimination policy based on race, color, religion, national origin and sexual orientation, among other things.

There is an exemption, however, for religious colleges that “make adherence to a faith a condition of faculty employment, though we require them to make it clear in all advertising that they do this,” Appiah said.

Paul Corts, president of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, criticized the policy, telling InsideHigherEd.com that the new policy “doesn’t respect diversity but rather seeks to force all institutions to conform to a single mold of the APA’s choosing.”

But Appiah said the organization’s new policy simply indicates those that fail to comply with the standards they set and does not “force” institutions to do anything.

“Our view that a practice is discriminatory certainly commits us to hoping that they will come to see that they ought not to engage in it,” he explained. “So far as not ‘respecting diversity’ goes, I think we should plead guilty: it is certainly true that, like the Christian colleges, we do not welcome among the kinds of diversity the form of ethical diversity that consists in doing what is wrong!”

“The policy of the APA is that colleges that [make hiring decisions based on sexual orientation] are unethical,” Appiah added, noting that he was not speaking ex officio on behalf of the APA.

The news comes eight months after Charles Hermes, a philosophy professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, drafted a petition advocating for the change, according to the philosophy blog Leiter Reports. The official APA petition, which has been signed by 1,469 APA members, was proposed by Alastair Norcross of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Princeton philosophy professor Shamik Dasgupta, who signed the petition, said he sees this new policy as a necessary step forward.

“My initial thoughts were that the current wording of the APA’s anti-discriminatory policy left open too many loopholes for anti-gay institutions to take advantage of, and that something had to be done,” he said in an e-mail.

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Overall, the response to the new policy has been “overwhelmingly positive,” said Princeton philosophy professor Daniel Garber, who is a member of the APA’s Eastern Division Executive Committee and also signed the petition for the new policy.

“Hopefully it will discourage institutions from discriminating in this way,” he said. “If not, at least it will allow people who might be subject to discrimination to know what it is they are dealing with.”

Correction

An earlier version of this article stated that Paul Corts spoke with The Chronicle of Higher Education. In fact, he spoke with InsideHigherEd.com.