More than 650 people have signed an online petition calling on the American Philosophical Association to create a code of conduct for philosophy professors in the wake of several high-profile incidents in which female students have accused male professors of sexual harassment. In some of those cases, professors and students have criticized how universities responded to the charges.
The petition, started a week ago by Eleonore Stump, a philosophy professor at Saint Louis University, and Helen De Cruz, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford, also asks the association’s Board of Officers to establish “a statement of professional ethics.”
“We want to create a supportive environment where fellow faculty members and students feel safe,” the petition says, “and where their concerns are heard and addressed.”
Amy E. Ferrer, executive director of the association, said its board would consider the requests at a coming meeting. In a statement posted online in response to the petition, Ms. Ferrer said the group currently directs members to the Statement on Professional Ethics published by the American Association of University Professors. That statement calls on professors to “avoid any exploitation, harassment, or discriminatory treatment of students.”
Ms. Stump said the philosophical association needed a more-detailed code than that. She cited codes published by the American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association that, she said, lay out more specifically the behavior expected of faculty members in those fields.
“No code has the power to make people behave in certain ways,” Ms. Stump said in an interview. “Nonetheless, if we at least say what we aspire to and what we find intolerable, we’ve taken one step forward in making the discipline more the way we would like it to be.”
String of Controversies
Women in philosophy have complained for years about sexist remarks and abusive behavior by male faculty members. Less than 20 percent of full-time professors in the discipline are female. A blog, What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy?, publishes anonymous stories in which female students and professors describe sexual harassment and gender bias on their campuses and at scholarly meetings.
In the last year the discipline has been hit by a string of highly publicized incidents. Last summer Colin McGinn, a prominent philosopher at the University of Miami, was accused of sending sexually explicit email and text messages to a female graduate student. Mr. McGinn denied doing anything wrong but resigned from his university post over the issue.
In February the University of Colorado at Boulder removed the philosophy-department chairman and suspended admission to its graduate program in the discipline following findings by an outside review panel that the department was hostile to women. The review panel, established by the philosophy association’s Committee on the Status of Women, had visited the campus last fall and found that the department “maintains an environment with unacceptable sexual harassment, inappropriate sexualized unprofessional behavior, and divisive uncivil behavior.”
Earlier this month Boulder administrators put Dan Kaufman, a philosophy professor there, on leave and barred him from the campus. The university did not link its action to the review panel’s findings, saying it could not talk publicly about personnel matters. Mr. Kaufman has told newspaper reporters that he cannot comment on the action.
The Discipline’s Problems
Then last week Northwestern University announced it had removed a philosophy professor from the classroom for the remainder of the academic year amid a continuing controversy over allegations that, in 2012, he supplied alcohol to an undergraduate and took her home to his apartment. Northwestern students marched on the campus this month, protesting how the university had handled the harassment charges against Peter Ludlow, the philosophy professor.
The university docked Mr. Ludlow’s salary after finding him guilty of some of the undergraduate’s charges. But until this month the university had allowed him to continue to teach. Mr. Ludlow did not return telephone calls and email messages from The Chronicle. Professors, students, and alumni have signed an online petition, asking Northwestern to change the way it deals with harassment allegations against professors.
Students at the University of Oxford, meanwhile, published an open letter this month accusing administrators there of inadequately responding to a female student’s charges of sexual harassment against a philosophy professor last May. The student committed suicide a month later, after breaking up with her boyfriend.
Even some of those who’ve signed the philosophy-association petition say a conduct code wouldn’t necessarily solve the discipline’s problems. “It seems to me that ethics codes don’t make anybody behave better,” said Hilde Lindemann, who leads the philosophy association’s Committee on the Status of Women.
But Ms. Lindemann, a professor of philosophy at Michigan State University, said she had signed the petition because such codes “can remind people about best ethical practices in the profession.” Any new code, she said, “probably wouldn’t help change the climate very much, but it might at least lay out the profession’s own sense of how it should behave.”