Years ago the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on Hispanics sponsored a symposium at the Eastern Division Meeting where a puzzling case was discussed. I believe it remains of interest and so offer it for consideration.
Suppose your department has no faculty members from a particular racial, ethnic, or sexual group. In the past some have applied, but none has ever been chosen. A representative of your school’s Board of Trustees consults you about a proposal, currently being considered by the Board, to fund a professorship for your department that is open only to scholars from that particular racial, ethnic, or sexual group. Would you support this idea? If so, would you agree that the announcement of the position should inform potential applicants of its special feature, so that all can decide whether to apply in light of full information about the search?
The situation was addressed in an essay by Tom L. Beauchamp, who wrote,
Incompleteness in advertising sometimes stems from fear of legal liability but more often from fear of departmental embarrassment and harm either to reputation or to future recruiting efforts. The greater moral embarrassment, however, is that we academics fear making public what we believe to be morally commendable and mandatory in our recruiting efforts. There is something deeply wrong in this circumstance, one that virtually every academic department now faces. (Tom L. Beauchamp, “Quotas by Any Name: Some Problems of Affirmative Action in Faculty Appointments,” in Affirmative Action and the University: A Philosophical Inquiry, ed. Steven M. Cahn, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993, 215.)
But what, if anything, is wrong? Is it the proposed practice, the law, the lack of moral courage on the part of faculty, or something else?
This essay will appear in a forthcoming issue of Teaching Ethics.
Steven M. Cahn
Steven M. Cahn is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Among the books he has authored are Professors as Teachers (2022), Exploring Academic Ethics (2024), From Student to Scholar: A Candid Guide to Becoming a Professor, Second Edition (2024), Religion Within Reason, Second Edition (2025), and the recently published Pathways Through Academia (2025), from which this essay is adapted.
