St. Maximos' Hut

Jacob Levy has a long response on the "religious faculty only hiring" issue over at The Volokh Conspiracy (it is in the comments to Juan Non-Volokh's post.)

The whole thing is worth reading. He raises two points I think are worth further discussion:

Point 1:

. . . a scholarly association can and should be true to its ethic of the academic vocation that holds that religious belief is not an appropriate hiring criterion for scientists (in Weber's sense of "science").

Now, the AEA doesn't tell us why it excludes job advertisements that discriminate on the basis of religion, it just says "Advertisements may not be discriminatory" and "Listings that indicate discrimination on the basis of religion are not permitted even if the employer is eligible to discriminate on the basis of religion under Sec. 703(e) of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."

Somewhat oddly, it also says "Foreign universities are not subject to U.S. laws and regulations concerning equal opportunity employment. Some of their hiring procedures and employment practices may vary from those in the United States."

This last bit suggests that, perhaps, foreign universities do discriminate but somehow get their listings into the AEA list. It seems like it would be simple to ask them to certify that they don't discriminate if that's the AEA's concern.

I don't think the AEA gives us enough information to judge whether or not its basis is the one suggested by Jacob Levy. It just says you can't discriminate. The AEA also lumps religious institutions' preferences for believers together with racial, sex, disability, color, and national origin - which suggests that perhaps the AEA hasn't thought through the issue since there clearly is a difference. Maybe not enough of a difference to produce a different outcome, but a difference nonetheless.

In any event, if a professional organization is going to take a stand on such an issue, shouldn't (as a practical matter) the organization explain its views to help convert those who haven't thought about it to the organization's point of view?

If one pokes around on the AEA website, one can find minutes of the meetings. The most recent meeting to address this issue (according to the Job Openings for Economists web page, has this to say:

JOE continues to follow a policy prohibiting listings that express discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, sexual preference, or physical handicap, as adopted by the Executive Committee in 1986. Siegfried noted that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 permits employment discrimination on the basis of religion at an educational institution when the institution is owned, supported, controlled, or managed by a particular religious corporation, association, or society, or if the curriculum of such educational institution is directed toward the propagation of a particular religion. Some educational institutions listing jobs in JOE qualify for the religion-based exemption, but currently JOE does not permit them to indicate that they discriminate. Because this may waste the time of some job applicants, the Executive Committee considered whether to relax this prohibition. Before deciding the matter, it asked for a legal opinion as to liability if the Association were to permit job listings to indicate that an institution discriminates on the basis of religion when, in fact, the institution did not qualify for the exemption. It was also noted that the Association’s statement does not specifically exclude discrimination on the basis of national origin. The Association’s Counsel was asked also to review the sufficiency of the Association’s policy pertaining to national origin.

This doesn't sound like high-minded policy - it sounds like bad lawyering and chicken-sh*t behavior. Being sued by somebody who reads an ad in which the advertiser claims a legal status that the advertiser in fact does not have, given that the advertiser is a member of the very small class of organizations allowed to post in the JOE, is so small a risk that doing more than posting a disclaimer or asking the advertiser for an agreement indemnifying the AEA is really going way overboard.

Maybe the AEA has a principled basis for its behavior, but this evidence doesn't support that. The policy was adopted at an earlier meeting, but I couldn't find those minutes on the web site.

Levy's second point:

The scholarly associations, like religious colleges, are built on a certain model of what scholarship and the scholarly life is like. Nothing wrong with that, even if the the two models are incompatible. And, frankly, as strongly as I believe in the associational freedom of religious colleges and in their right [against the state] to discriminate in hiring, it also seems to me a bad, non-scholarly thing to do, and the scholarly associations are under no obligation to pretend otherwise.

Why? What is wrong with discriminating on the basis of religious affiliation? It may not affect how well I do economics, but it might affect a lot about how I relate to students, my colleagues, etc. There's a lot to be said for a collegial department. Moreover, there is no particular reason to think that hiring with religious qualifications in mind will degrade the quality of the economics deparment that such hiring produces. Wheaton, for example, has a particularly fine economics department (featuring, of course, our own PJ - nice photo of him on the department home page). We tend to think that the verb "to discriminate" means something bad because it is so closely tied to illegitimate forms of discrimination (especially race) that we forget that choosing is discriminating.

I think a world with both Wheaton and Case Western Reserve University, my own, secular, university is a better world, and likely produces better economics, than a world with just one kind of economics department. For one thing, we can evaluate which approach is the superior one through observing data.