APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1

Since my report of a year ago, the Committee has met as a whole, together with Eric Hoffman, in Chicago on October 12, 1998, and worked through a long agenda. We have sponsored several paper-reading sessions at all three divisional conventions of the APA. The first issue of our newsletter has appeared. Two new members have begun service and two others have retired. We have issued a call for narratives of experience in the profession during the 20th century for the 100th Anniversary celebration. We have co-signed a letter to a Philosophy Department Chair responding to a complaint by a member of the profession regarding possible discrimination. And, finally, we have submitted to the APA Board a list of items that we would like to see the APA attend to. I expand on these activities below.

New members Chris Horvath and Mark Chekola were welcomed to the Committee in July 1999 (with terms running until July 2002). We are grateful to Jake Hale and Ed Stein, who completed their service in July 1999, for their dedication, valuable work, and good spirits during our inaugural year.

Our first newsletter appeared in the APA Newsletters Vol. 98, #2 (Spring 1999), edited by Timothy Murphy. It includes our call for narratives of 20th century experience in the profession on p. 119; summaries of our "Talk with the APA" at the Eastern APA meetings in Philadelphia 1997; the Committee’s official charge and web site; a list of members of the Committee and a report from the Committee Chair; a bibliographical article by Jake Hale on transgender studies; and a list of APA convention presentations sponsored.

At our meeting of the Committee as a whole, we took up a long agenda that included the following items: (1) asking the APA to sponsor a separate meeting of the Chairs of the various status committees, either at an APA convention or on a separate day / place and paid for by the APA, to discuss such items as how to put teeth into the nondiscrimination policy, the anniversary theme, and the feasibility and desirability of a joint survey; (2) whether the mission of our committee should be so interpreted to include trying to answer the question "What impact on my job prospects will doing and being known for doing LGBT work have?" and working toward establishing an LGBT philosophy journal, comparable to Hypatia; (3) newsletter contents, (4) creating an LGBT philosophy web site with appropriate links, (5) creating an LGBT philosophy brochure, (6) APA health insurance, whether it meets the specific needs of LGBT and HIV+ members of the profession, (7) putting teeth into the nondiscrimination policy, (8) the 100th anniversary; we agreed in principle to endorse Committee on the Status of Women’s (CSW) suggestion for "Embracing Diversity" to be the celebration theme; (9) whether to join with CSW on a survey of women, ethnic and racial minorities, and LGBT members of the profession; we may be interested in doing so, depending on what information is solicited and how; (10) newsletter distribution (see our recommendations to the APA below); and (11) convention sites; we had no consensus on whether to ask that conventions not be scheduled in states that have sodomy laws.

Early in 1999 we received a complaint from a faculty member of the profession regarding possible job discrimination. The possible discrimination concerned a requested transfer from an area studies program to the department of philosophy within the complainant’s university, which was denied by a very close vote of the philosophy department. The complainant is a philosophy Ph.D. who has a history of having taught in a small prestigious liberal arts college philosophy department for many years and is currently a member of an area studies program at a large state university. After lengthy e-mail correspondence with the complainant and the Chair of the APA Committee on the Status of Women, we co-signed a letter by CSW to the Department Chair and the Dean of that University outlining some of the issues that the complaint raises but not making any judgments as to whether the complaint was valid or not. The chair of that philosophy department wrote a letter in response indicating that he did not think there was evidence of discrimination. There has been no further follow-up, to my knowledge.