...some thought will need to be given to what such a code should encompass. The original impetus for this was, of course, the repeated incidents of sexual harassment and misconduct that appeared in the news over the last year or so, and so one issue on which the Committee will have to decide is whether the APA should take a stand on such issues as: (1) whether to recommned that faculty and students never date (some universities already have such policies), and (2) whether to recommend sanctions for sexual harassment.
On the other hand, some blogospheric blather suggests that some people think "professionalism" standards should reach further. (Caution is required here: calling someone's conduct "unprofessional" can be defamatory per se, insofar as it suggests they are unfit to practice their profession; "unethical" might be better, since as the blogosphere testifies every day, "ethical" has no cognitive content, it simply designates whatever often arbitrary norm the speaker likes). I'm not sure the APA is well-situated to draft an "Emily Post" set of guidelines, though there is plenty of arguably unprofessional and certainly juvenile conduct by philosophers out there--e.g., using blogs to solicit anonymous attacks on other philosophers; threatening other philosophers with shaming and harassment; insisting that others conform to the speaker's standards of politeness (and then threatening them with shaming and harassment if they don't), and so on--but the standards and remedies for such misconduct probably should be informal, rather than codified. The APA, of course, has no enforcement powers, and were it try to enforce such standards, they would run afoul of a variety of legal and sometimes constitutional protections.
My hope is that the APA Committee will focus on recommending general expectations for faculty-student relations. Those might have some influence on departmental and perhaps university policies.
UPDATE: Should the APA Code, several readers wonder, address questions about racist and sexist speech? I don't have the sense this is a major issue in the profession, by comparison to problems of, for example, sexual harassment. But even if it were, how would an APA code work?
Consider a recent case that came to my attention: a senior female philosopher, who objected to my criticism of Prof. Jennings, declared on a very public Facebook page that, "We can't let 'boys will be boys' be an excuse anymore." A typical definition of "boys will be boys" is that it is "used to express the view that mischievous or childish behavior is typical of boys or young men and should not cause surprise when it occurs." This is, obviously, remarkably sexist and demeaning when applied to a 51-year-old man, a professional lawyer and philosopher, who has never pulled punches about anything or anyone and who believes strongly in plain and direct speech. Instead of acknowledging, accurately, that the speaker disagrees with my critical approach, it erases my agency and demeans me as merely "mischievous" and "childish," someone whose behavior might be, at best, "excused," instead of recognized, correctly, as a reasonable, but differing, approach to public debate.
Should the APA sanction this kind of irresponsible, demeaning, and sexist abuse? I don't think so: first, the APA, as noted above, has no way to do so that would survive legal challenge; and second, the APA is ill-equipped to police the boundaries of proper discourse, which are themselves contested, notwithstanding the efforts of various blogospheric pontificators to pronounce otherwise. (It's always been striking to me that the kind of sanctimonious idiocy that periodically grips a minority of mostly younger philosophers rarely crops up among my colleagues in the legal academy, where people recognize that professionals have differing views about the norms of public discourse. There's clearly a failure of adult and professional socialization going on in academic philosophy--the sexual harassment crisis is the most notorious evidence of that--but how it is to be remedied is a topic for another day.)
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