This is a particularly challenging question. It splits into two levels: 1) the right to hold unpopular opinions; 2) the right to reject people on the basis of an issue over which the individuals have no control (for example, ethnic background). Regarding the first of these, the individual is probably of a conservative religious background (could be Christian, Muslim, Jewish), and academia has tended to favor secular perspectives. This is a form of political correctness, and serves us poorly. I happen to have a personal (and politically correct) bias against fascists and authoritarians – should these strongly held biases be a basis for professional rejection? Regarding the second point, I believe it is fair to reject individuals who demonstrate racist, sexist, anti-religious, anti-ethnic biases. The key is that the person is acting to judge people on the basis of criteria they cannot change. Most of us believe that homosexuality, trans-gender identification, and the like, are inborn, not really changeable. The same is not, however, true of premarital sex. So I think a discussion of the basis of the COV’s positions should be in order. Is the bias against pre-marital sex, be it male-male, male-female, female-female? If so, do they allow for same-sex marriage, or do they have a blanket rejection of homosexuality? If the latter, I would personally disqualify them from candidacy for the position.

Let the candidate sink their own chances by trying to argue for the view that homosexuality is immoral in their job talk.

I suspect that offense is a red herring in most cases where it is discussed – as the language of this post and the responses demonstrate, there is a subjectivity to what is considered offensive that makes it seem very iffy to base much of anything on it. (After all, another group might find it offensive to say that homosexuality is morally permissible.) I am inclined to think that when offense (or the possibility of it) is seen as having potential moral significance – like in this case – it is not the purported offensiveness that is really relevant but something else. (Something like marginalization, which would explain why the offensiveness of condemning homosexuality is considered potentially morally significant, while the offense someone might feel at seeing two men kiss chastely in public is not.)

If this notion is correct, focusing on the offensiveness, rather than what may really be offering any “moral oomph” involved, may be misleading.

Anyone who follows Supreme Court appointment hearings might have the same thought that I had: COV is getting Borked!

I’m not sure whether or not the students’ behavior is appropriate. But whether it is appropriate or not, I expect this sort of thing (i.e., grad students looking out into the Internet for evidence about job applicants) to be more the norm than the exception. I imagine that current graduate students, armed with google, will be looking here, at Leiter, the other blogs, the reddit philosophy communities, etc. to see what they can learn about what job candidates are actually like. And I’m guessing they’ll see through the pseudonyms we’ve decided to use. (Hi classmates at my mid-range Leiterrific department!!) Current graduate students (and others on the job market) should probably take note: until you’re safely installed (and tenured), there are at least pro tanto, pragmatic reasons not to get involved in public debate or to conduct your public behavior conservatively and diplomatically.

If anyone is from that department is reading: I’m super LGBTQ friendly and totally open to be recruited. My teaching brings all the students to the yard.

If your institution requires ideological commitment to a set of particular, controversial issues in order for you to be a qualified to be there, then privatize your institution and draft a statement of faith detailing those ideological commitments. Otherwise, find better ways to insulate yourself from ideological diversity that won’t put you on the losing end of a lawsuit.

As someone who has openly argued against gay marriage online and has since changed my view, I hope I will not be denied a job for something I said years ago and but longer believe. People change their views. Hopefully philosophers do this often as new evidence comes in. So, even if you think the candidate should be denied a job for holding offensive moral views (which I don’t buy for a second for the reasons mentioned above), you still need really good evidence that this philosopher STILL holds his/her offensive moral views.

“I think we should endorse the claim that holding and publicly promoting false views is evidence of lack of philosophical competence”!!

This can’t be true. There are philosophers of the highest competence who defend both sides of almost every issue: some of those philosophers must be defending false views. David Lewis held all sorts of false views (modal realism, if none other), but, um, I doubt there was anyone more competent than him.

I’d be interested in seeing if there is a good reply to Boonin’s comment. A good number of vegan philosophers I know are publicly strident about it. But *none* of the “conservative” philosophers* I know are publicly strident about it. Obviously, I don’t doubt that there are strident conservative philosophers, but our COV obviously isn’t one of them.

* I think this is generally true, but it is certainly true of those with conservative views about sex.

I don’t understand the argument JDRox is making about Lewis. The following things seem perfectly consistent.

1. Lewis was an incredibly competent philosopher.
2. Lewis’s endorsement of modal realism was evidence against his competency.

They’re consistent because we have lots and lots of other evidence for Lewis’s philosophical competence. Indeed, even in _Plurality_, he offers sound arguments for lots of philosophically important claims. So that very book is evidence for his competency, even if we hold the falsity of its central thesis against him.

I don’t know what I think about whether endorsing false views is (some, defeasible) evidence against competency or not. But this isn’t a good objection to the view.

A couple thoughts:

1.) As Mark mentioned above, one thing worth considering when conducting google hunts is the date of the problematic posting(s). People do learn and change their minds, and we should be open to that possibility (if it’s plausible in the given case!). I think this is especially important for the generation of graduates going on the market now, since they were part of the internet explosion of the late nineties and early aughts, and may well have been too young to know much better when they posted (or at the beginning of their university/grad careers, etc.).

2.) I don’t know how it works there, but here, graduate students do get one vote in the hiring process, and we have a number of chances to offer feedback, including during the hiring meeting(s). I don’t know that I’m entirely comfortable with the idea of asking the department to remove a COV from the search outright (that seems bound to produce acrimony), but perhaps that’s because I feel that I can trust a sufficient majority of my department not to vote to hire such a candidate once such information was brought to light by graduate students, whatever the candidate’s other credentials.

Peter Unger thinks people don’t exist. I think a case could be made that hiring people like him would create a very awkward and possibly offensive working environment.

The candidate shouldn’t be disqualified because he or she believes homosexuality is wrong. What then of the grad students’ concerns? If the person is hired, the department should have public discussions on the topic, and so show how the disagreement can be dealt with philosophically. This way both people who agree with the candidate and those who don’t can have a chance to express themselves about a matter that is deeply important; and in that process they can build a sense of community that otherwise might seem impossible to establish together.

Where will the time come from to have such public discussions in the department? Faculty do three things: teach, research, service. Public discussions aren’t teaching (no one is getting graded). They are not service either exactly, though they serve a big purpose. They are most like research in the sense of engaging publically with colleagues and having philosophical discussions. So some research time can be used to facilitate such discussions. From somewhere time has to be found to have these conversations publically in the department. Otherwise people’s experiences will get repressed, which will lead to seeing strong political actions as the only way to have one’s experiences recognized.

Remind me not to work in a department that would not have hired Plato, Cicero, or Aquinas because of their views on sexual morality.

I certainly agree that those claims are consistent. I do think there is a tension between them, however, at least if by “evidence” we mean “significant evidence that is not easily swamped”. And the claim that “holding and publicly promoting false views is evidence of lack of philosophical competence” is not really interesting or relevant unless we mean that. The drift of Miller’s comment seems to be that it is legitimate to oppose hiring COV, since it was discovered that COV held some false views, and holding false views is evidence of incompetence. If holding false views was only insubstantial evidence, or easily swamped evidence, of incompetence, his point would be irrelevant to this discussion. But maybe I’m missing something?

In any case, I myself think that almost all of Lewis’s (most famous) views are false–and in some cases obviously false–but I don’t think I have *any* evidence that Lewis “lacked philosophical competence”. But of course now I am not arguing, just sharing my feelings. But I do think a lot of people will share those feelings.

Well, I guess this means that I should stop applying to tenure-track positions in philosophy. Given that I have defended the view that homosexuality is *not* immoral online, a group of graduate students where I’m applying who think otherwise might find it “uncomfortable” if I bring my partner to social events, accuse me of creating a “hostile environment” by my very presence, and use one of the most visible platforms in the profession to undermine my candidacy before my on-campus visit even occurs.

Is refusing to hire someone because they have beliefs that are the official beliefs of a recognized religion, e.g. Roman Catholicism, that they belong to a form of discrimination on the basis of religion?

@12
You are surely right that the grad students in question are not censoring someone, in the sense of directly exerting their power in order to punish a person for that person’s views. However, they do appear to be advocating for censorship, and that seems like it could be objectionable even if it is not itself an act of censorship. Compare with a parallel case in which grad students demand that a gay philosopher not be hired on account of their sexual orientation. Even though the grad students would not have direct power over the hiring process, such a demand seems objectionable. (And, importantly, it would be objectionable not merely because it expresses an objectionable attitude, but also because it promotes unjust behavior by the people who actually make the hiring decision.)

As for your claim that the students have every right to say what they have said, and that they should not be censored, you are again surely right – but who has suggested otherwise?

Responding to Anon @ 3:26pm:

I don’t understand your complaint about the cases – I don’t think you’ve raised an important distinction between them and the actual COV case. In my opinion, to borrow your words: “given the way the world actually is, anyone who held [the views of COV] would most likely be a seriously bigoted person”. That makes it parallel to the cases I’ve presented. The question, in the case of COV and my hypotheticals, is whether someone’s holding views that are correlated with serious bigotry can be a reason to hesitate to employ them. I am asking whether those who answer ‘no’ recognize any limitations on this answer, or whether they are absolutists about ‘intellectual freedom’.

Your answer to my question appears to be that you accept absolutism, provided that the candidate hold their views “on the basis of philosophical argument”. I wonder how we are to assess whether a person genuinely holds their views on such a basis. Is it enough that the person advance a set of claims, written in respectful academic prose, purportedly leading to the controversial conclusion? What if the argument in that set of claims is extremely unconvincing to anyone other than the author? Is that still “on the basis of philosophical argument”? If so, it would appear to be extremely easy for any trained philosopher to count as holding any horrible view whatsoever “on the basis of philosophical argument”. You may then be committed, if you accept absolutism about ‘intellectual freedom’ to accepting the candidacy of all my DOV-GOV and some far worse hypothetical candidates as well.

The apt question about the candidate, as others have I think already explicitly and implicitly said, is whether they would discriminate and/or create a hostile work environment, especially (but not exclusively) with regard to those over whom the candidate, if hired, would have power.
The discussion to this point has proceeded on the presumption that the discovery was that the candidate has expressed the view that sex between persons of the same sex is immoral. While I believe it is, on the basis of first-person experience and reliable testimony, true as a rule of thumb that people who hold this belief tend to act badly towards persons who do have (or are presumed to have) sex of the sort the person regards as morally prohibited (in a way that, again merely rule of thumb, vegetarians do not so behave) I don’t think either of those rules of thumb constitute adequate reason for raising doubts about this person’s candidacy.
On the other hand, I also wonder whether the description of the case as having discovered that the candidate holds the view that “homosexual acts and premarital sex are immoral” captures what’s going on, or whether it was so described in an effort to vague-it-up, so as to prevent discovery of the particulars. I don’t in any way object to the effort, if that’s what’s happened– I neither have any idea, nor want any idea, of the particulars in the particular case at hand. But. There are many things I have read and heard–some in public fora– philosophers say about gay people, about the ways in which it is permissible to treat gay people (including professionally) that I would– unlike the ‘mere’ claim that “homosexual sex is immoral”– regard as serious prima facie grounds for wondering whether a person who avowed such views would be capable and in fact willing to abide by non-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation and gender identity. And I wonder whether there’s an effort being made to capture such remarks under the general characterization in the original post, in part because I find myself unwilling here to give specific examples precisely because (as outrageous as they are) I cannot see a way of doing so that would not identify particular person(s). Suppose that were the case. Suppose for instance (to take an example that is actually merely hypothetical, as far as I know) someone said, “of course we should watch out for those gay philosophers in the classroom–everybody knows that gay people are pedophiles”. If I discovered that a job candidate had said this, I would think this would at least warrant investigation of their past behavior (insofar as it is possible).

Some very religious persons are among the staunchest defenders of secularism and freedom of expression. Just because someone advocates for a religious viewpoint online is not adequate justification to bar them from a classroom, under the presumption that they would discriminate against those not of their religious persuasion. Likewise, someone could be an anti-religion advocate, and also be a great defender of secularism and the freedom of expression, including the freedom of religious expression. The question is how they would treat colleagues and students in a professional milieu. And, presumably, someone with a PhD has established a history regarding their treatment of colleagues and students in a professional milieu. We need not sleuth out their personal religious views on morality to determine this. In fact, it is probably a very poor indicator.

Is the department part of a public or private institution? I ask only because in the wake of UIUC’s treatment of Salaita, many argued that even if UIUC wasn’t in violation of contractual obligations they had to Salaita, they (as a public institution) might have nevertheless violated his First Amendment rights by refusing to honor their offer of employment merely on the basis of his tweets. I am not a lawyer, but if the department in question is part of a public institution and they acquiesce to the graduate students’ call to withdraw consideration of the candidate on the basis of something that he allegedly wrote years before (particularly something that reflects his political or religious views), then is that not relevantly similar to some of the problematic aspects of the Salaita case? After all, in Rutan v. Republican Party, 497 U.S. 62 (1990)–one of the cases that Salaita supports seem to lean on–SCOTUS held that it is unconstitutional to base hiring decisions of low-level public employees on party affiliation and support. Presumably, the same is true for one’s (no doubt, wrong in this case) moral judgments concerning the permissibility of various sex acts.

Again, I’m not an expert on the legal intricacies of these issues, but on its face, it seems that the graduate students *might* (I emphasize “might” because I’m genuinely unsure) be advocating something illegal.

It’s kind of annoying when philosophers make debates about real life issues into nerdy technical arguments with numbered premises and conclusions and words like “epistemic”. Regardless: some people seem to be suggesting this person should be denied a job on the basis that they hold a false belief. If this is true, and “x is morally wrong” is a false belief, then all expressivists should be denied jobs, because they believe it is false that “x is morally wrong” can be true or false.

Anonymous grad student–first, some (relatively minor) points. You may have heard less precisely because you are a graduate student. I certainly had no idea into what kind of discriminatory world I was stepping when I was a graduate student, and neither did my (straight) advisors. Second, “hold such views”– ime, the content of “such views” makes a great deal of difference. The person who holds personal beliefs about the immorality of various sex acts and circumstances under which those acts do or might occur, where the prohibitions include sex acts engaged that are also engaged in by persons not of the same sex but regarded as prohibited when engaged in by persons of the same sex–they tend to be (anecdata) disagreeable, uncomfortable, not to be relied on to do the right thing when very bad things happen and so on. But in discriminatory likelihood , “such views” as those do not hold a candle to those whose “such views” include agitating against non-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation, objecting to marriage equality on ‘grounds’ rejected as false by every major psychological/psychiatric/pediatric and medical association (not the mere objecting to marriage equality, mind you, it is–as Kathryn suggested above, the purported ‘grounds’ which are the real tell here).
But in some ways, all of this is a side show. I didn’t, in my first post here, suggest that even if the candidate held “such views” as I regard to be strong prima facie grounds to worry about discriminatory conduct and the creation of a hostile work environment, their application should be tossed out. I suggested that an investigation–a very careful one, with no voting until everyone is satisfied that the investigation is adequate– into their past behavior is warranted. Perhaps also speaking directly with the candidate, making clear (should it be the case) that the university/college has a non-discrimination policy that the candidate would be expected to abide by should an offer be made, and being clear about what that entails. Certainly allowing concerned members to discuss the matter–perhaps in some mediated fashion- perhaps with the candidate themselves (iff the concerned parties are both brave enough and willing to do so), and should an offer be made to the candidate, figuring out concrete, practical and meaningful ways (not mere words) to protect lbgt members of the department from discriminatory conduct.

I have the impression (but I could be wrong) that observant, traditional Muslims are underrepresented in Anglo-American academic philosophy. If those holding conservative sexual views were excluded from philosophy jobs, this group would be even more poorly represented. I am afraid that this would (1) hinder the Anglo-American philosophical community’s understanding of the philosophical worldview of observant Islam, and (2) be a barrier to dialogue between Anglo-American philosophy and the observant Muslim world.

This is not a full argument for or against any particular hiring practice, but, I think, an issue worth considering in this discussion.

A Fantasy:
Everything is as Justin describes it. Some grad students send emails to the faculty saying “I think candidate may believe that homosexuality is immoral and because of that I’m not comfortable with us hiring candidate.”
Faculty Representative (FR): Thank you for your input, the climate for lgbt students is very important to us, we will take this under advisement.

The faculty deliberate. Maybe it turns out there is no solid evidence that candidate has the views. Maybe those views have nothing to do with their research or teaching interests. Maybe there is evidence in the candidate’s dossier that they are very good at engaging with queer students despite their personal views. Maybe their research is just so promising compared to the other candidates that the search committee wants to take a chance on them. Maybe the candidate is themselves lgbt. Whatever it is, the faculty decides to hire this person.

The FR says to the Graduate Students (GS): We decided to hire X. This was our reasoning (explain reasoning). We highly value your input and we are fully invested in your success. We urge you to welcome this new hire as you would anyone else but we have a plan in place to monitor the climate for students and we will be closely watching the issue. (Say what the plan is.)
GS: We understand your reasoning. We still have concerns but we feel valued.

The candidate comes to campus to start the job. As an intellectual activity everyone in the department reads a bunch of queer theory together and develops a shared vocabulary to discuss future issues. People may or may not change their views about sexual morality as a result but they are able to discuss the issues without marginalizing anyone or being heteronormative (or at least become open to being called out if they accidentally do something problematic in these ways). Everyone lives happily ever after and it turned out it was good those grad students voiced their concerns.

Of course, but religious people aren’t persecuted the same way that queer people are (and especially by religious people). So it’s a false equivalency.

I am curious about a cousin of AJF’s question @23. AJF asks about how departments should response to candidates who hold views that go increasingly beyond the pale. I am interested in how departments should have responded to candidates who held those views at times when the consensus against them was still emerging–that is, when they were on their way out, but when they still had mainstream support.

For instance, suppose a job candidate in, say, the late 1940s had what at the time were moderate conservative views about race: he (in the context, we can say “he”) felt segregation was regrettable but necessary for the South, say, though he was glad to work in institutions with students of color and by all accounts was just as friendly and supportive, on average, as the white professors who were bitterly opposed to segregation. (Of course, like most white people at the time, much in his behavior would still count, from our perspective, as pretty damn racist.) When people at the department considering hiring him discovered his segregationist views, they were surprised.

So, should a department in the 1940s have treated a candidate’s moderate segregationist views as a conclusive reason not to hire him? I can think of arguments on both sides. Certainly, even many progressive people would have seen it as an attempt to enforce excessive ideological conformity. On the other hand, most (maybe virtually all) of the white people in the debate would have significantly underestimated the harm that hiring the candidate would do to students of color–the pedagogical relationships they could have the candidate would be significantly impaired (since his views in fact expressed deep disrespect toward them), and they should not have been expected to treat segregation as admitting of reasonable disagreement.

In any case, the answer isn’t obvious to me, and it’s also not obvious to me how analogous the historical case is to the present one. But I do think the similarities of the cases constitute a strong case for epistemic humility on the part of people (like me) who are not themselves queer.

I’m glad Anonyobvious brought this up, but dismayed that it’s gone unnoticed. It’s what I had in mind with my earlier comment:

Isn’t this really just an issue about perceived “fit” or “collegiality”? Faculty members regularly vote for and against job candidates based on these factors. Those of you on search committees regularly reject candidates for similar reasons. It’s not particularly fair, but it seems to be widely viewed as a legitimate way of choosing between highly qualified candidates. Candidates X and Y have very impressive dossiers, but X has some personal views that I find objectionable (or, as people elsewhere have said, X doesn’t drink, is awkward/weird, etc.), and that make me doubt X will make a great colleague. So I prefer candidate Y. Strikes me as basically the same thing, and no more or less objectionable.

Another thought occurs: it seems that it should be possible to test the assumption that COVs are more likely to mistreat or harm members of disadvantaged groups. We could look at the teaching evaluations of a large group of professors (perhaps separating out courses in which said controversial issues would naturally come up, like ethics classes, from others, to see if there is a difference), ask professors for their views on the controversial topics in question (anonymously, of course), and see if there is any correlation between offensive views and responses to questions like,
– “Does this professor respect all points of view?”
– “Does this professor treat students fairly?”

This doesn’t seem like a very difficult study to do. Harmful behavior by COVs might manifest itself in ways that does not come out on these teaching evaluation questions, of course, but this would at least be a first step towards getting some hard data.

@Grad Sockpuppet: The way current job searches are structured now, in public institutions, anyway, makes it completely impossible to base a hiring decision on “fit” or “collegiality”, as these were considerations that gave cover to discriminatory hiring practices. I’m sure you aren’t unaware of this. Maybe the faculty searches you have direct experience with have involved discussion of such considerations, but any search justifying a hire with such reasons at a public institution responsible to the law would be failed, without question. And perhaps this shows that what you’ve offered as a modus ponens is, in light of the facts, a modus tollens.

@Brandon Cooke: that’s stated too strongly. It’s completely impossible to *explicitly* base a hiring decision on “fit.” And even there, the only people to whom you can’t make it explicit are higher-ups. In my department there are several people, the ones with the most power in fact, who endorse the view that our criterion for hiring should be: “would you like to have a beer with this guy?” (Direct quote). They’re perfectly willing to say this out loud in search committee meetings. They’re a little more circumspect in department meetings. And then they hide it completely when talking to the dean and the aff action office. There are forms we have to fill out with “objective” rankings of the candidates on various dimensions, and I’ve been instructed to cook those numbers so they come out the right way to justify hiring the guy we want to have a beer with. Funny, we’ve had trouble hiring minorities of any kind. Anyway, what I’m saying is: let’s not pretend there’s some ideal merit-based, academic-freedom-upholding, hiring process that these crazy grad students are trying to subvert.

So the proposal is, then, that an unethical and illegal rationale be co-opted for a possibly worthy aim? (I say “possibly” because it still has not been shown that defending bad or false positions means promoting a hostile learning environment.) And if “fit” is not a reason that can be supplied to the higher-ups, then how is it to be used in a situation such as this, where an invitation has already been made after (presumably) administrative approval?

Brandon Cooke: I don’t think there’s really a proposal on the table. There are all sorts of proposals that could be made, depending on one’s perspective. For example:

o Grad students: Don’t be uppity, and especially don’t be uppity in public! To the extent you’ve let it get around what department is in question, we’ll make sure you look really lame!
o Hiring Faculty: Don’t disguise your hierarchy policing as idealism, it’s not plausible. Everyone knows you accord yourselves the liberties these students are being criticized for attempting to participate in. You’re annoyed because it’s your job to assess whether a candidate is a good fit, so students need to trust your assessment. You feel, perhaps rightly, that taking a disagreement like this public hurts more than it helps. But piling on just makes things even more public.

But I’m not sure what your last message implies is even accurate. Equalize for issues of sex and race, and I don’t believe there’s any legal requirement for “meritocracy”, especially when strictly limited to a single merit (e.g. research). If you’re interviewing two white males, and one has a better CV and acts “weird”, and the other has a worse CV and acts “not weird”, you can hire the latter over the former. “Weird” is not a legally protected status. Virtually no one is hired just to do research. The same is legally true when comparing, for example, a black woman to a white man. But in such cases, the level of scrutiny may be much higher, because there are other reasons the committee may prefer to hire the white man that would not be legal, and going into the court case with a “weird” defense doesn’t look good. Universities and colleges also want to portray themselves in an idealistic light, so they prefer book-cooking (which also has the advantage of pushing the responsibility down below the level of administrators). Is that great? No. But given that those books aren’t really written for anyone to read, it may only be significantly unethical when the underlying decision is itself unethical.

So is it unethical not to hire someone who acts “weird”? If the standard is meritocracy, probably. Even if “weird” is “sexist jerk”, for example, if the standard is research skill, and the sexist jerk does better research, then you should still hire him. And the same would go for “doesn’t bathe often enough”. But no one thinks this way, because there are other aspects of being a member of a faculty.

What I take to be the underlying tension in this conversation is that if some candidate had bad views about black people, he would almost certainly get a pocket veto from the hiring committee. And the same if he had strong views against a particular religion (as opposed to “all religions except X”). LGBT folks don’t have pocket veto protection in intellectual culture yet, and it turns out that makes all the difference.

Anonyobvious,
I’m not sure I’m completely following your reply, but I am pretty sure that to some extent we’re talking past one another, because you seem to be discussing a different scenario then the one described in the OP. The relevant details of the OP, with implied events in parenthesis: finalists had been recommended (and approved by admin, so checked off by dean and HR/AA), then invited to campus for interviews. Grad students learned about one candidate’s unacceptable views, and asked/pressured/whatever the search committee to withdraw the invitation to the offensive candidate. My procedural points all spoke to the fact that *at this point*, having already made a successful case to the dean and HR/AA about their slate of finalists, retracting one invitation based on the grad students’ sleuthing would likely cause the search to be failed (it would where I live, anyway), and possibly open up the hiring institution to legal action from the offensive candidate, or maybe APA sanctioning. Nothing in any of this turns on assumptions, spurious or not, about meritocratic ideals. If the grad students really wanted to get their way, they could just see to it that the candidate had a really bad showing, instead of inserting themselves into the search process and forcing the search committee into a really awkward situation with admin and the candidate. But then, that wouldn’t be the spectacle that’s probably hoped for, would it?

Just to clarify my little piece of the dialectic: as I said in my initial post, I thought that the “principled” part of the issue had been ably covered by David Boonin and others. It struck me that the procedural aspect of this, which is pretty important as well, had gone completely undiscussed, and I wanted to bring those considerations into view. I do not endorse, and indeed reject, the idea that academic freedom talk reduces to institutional appearance talk. Some have that view; I do not. I’ve been around a while but I’m happy to say that I’m not yet nearly so cynical. I didn’t explicitly state an objection, but I think both on “principled” and on procedural grounds, what the grad students aim to do in this particular scenario is misguided and wrong. (Actually, I believe I did say this in my first post here.)

I don’t know whether the grad students understand how the system works. If they do, then they aren’t being very savvy, or they think their principled stance overrides any reason to think about the legitimate principles that might account for the way the search process is set up. In my experience many people have vague ideas about how searches work, but even being an interviewee many times does not reveal all of that half as much as sitting on or chairing a search. So again, it’s worthwhile to say a few things about how they work “under the hood”.

Hi Hector: I didn’t claim to be restating my earlier post. Indeed, I agreed with Troy that my earlier post might have cast the net too widely. It sounds like you think you’ve racked up a point on a scoreboard somewhere, but in fact you’re only making point that I’ve already agreed might be correct and calls for further thought on my part.

Let me also weigh in on the question of “fit.” I actually think that considerations of fit, which encompass the ideological views held by candidates, are not entirely out of place. However, it seems to me that there are two very different kinds of cases.

The first kind of case is the one where the COV holds a controversial view in a subject they are focused on in their research or teaching. This would be the case with the original COV were they an applied ethicist, or with, say, a philosopher of biology who worked on race and intelligence and held the views we’ve discussed above. Here I think there at least pragmatic reasons to not hire candidates whose views strongly offend students for a simple reason: the COV is unlikely to find that department an intellectually welcoming environment. Were I the COV, I would rather be in a department in which students felt open to discussing these issues with COVs than one in which they felt that my defending controversial views would make them uncomfortable. I’m enough of an “intellectual freedom absolutist” to think that in an ideal world these students would be more open-minded. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and I (sincerely) recognize that in some cases this is a lot to ask of students (or faculty) who have deeply held views on these issues. Given this, I think such considerations are better brought out into the open than ignored.

The second kind of case, though, is one where the COV works primarily on unrelated areas: for instance, suppose that the original COV specializes in epistemology. In this case, inasmuch as their personal views are not going to be the focus of their research or teaching, barring COVs seems to me much more McCarthy-esque.

Well look at it the other way. Would you have a problem hiring DOV if DOV was a Black separatist?
“To take the simplest parallel case: suppose you have a job candidate who has publicly stated the view that interracial sexual relationships are morally wrong. (This was my DOV case.) Would you say about this candidate: ‘Well, we’ll need to go and find out how this candidate has treated [white] students and colleagues in the past’? Would you say ‘So long as there is no evidence of actual mistreatment by DOV, then there is no reason DOV cannot teach [white] students’? Would you dismiss claims *by* current [white] students who say that they fear the environment that would be created by hiring DOV? (Would you mock them and condescendingly suggest that they brush up on their Mill?)
I do think that in this circumstance many students would be told to brush up on their Mill, and they should be.
What is considered to be the “correct” contemporary morality *will* change. What are we to do with those old dinosaurs who doubt the experiences reality of otherkin in 25 years? Just keep waiting for the always around the corner rash of philosopher retirements? No. Let people believe what they want; you are hiring a professional colleague, not a BFF.

Philosophy Prof. Kurt Huber, along with students Sophie Scholl and others, accepted the virtual certainty of torture and death in order to oppose Nazi repression of the handicapped, Jews, homosexuals, Roma, et alia. They called themselves the White Rose, and they are the closest thing to moral heroes that academic Philosophy can claim in the last century. Would these graduate students risk the guillotine to defend Huber or Scholl? Not likely. Given Huber and Scholl’s Catholic morals, these graduate students would ban Huber and Scholl from American Academia.

If this situation has been correctly reported, it is simply (and utterly) shameful.

I mean David Boonin.