The quote of the week for this week (though it’s only Thursday) concerns ableist, racist, and classist constraints on linguistic diversity and variation in philosophy.

In her latest BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY post, Mich Ciurria draws critical attention to some of the various ways in which journal referees constrain and “police” linguistic diversity in philosophy, including by “tone” policing authors, which places undue limits on oppositional and non-mainstream authors in particular; through the imposition on authors of specific vernacular standards and English-language requirements, which perpetuate classist and racist biases; and by stipulating certain fluency requirements on authors, which disadvantage and marginalize disabled people (among others).

Taken together, as Mich points out, furthermore, these constraints and requirements serve to stifle creativity and innovation in philosophy, in addition to the pernicious ways that they contribute to the homogeneity of philosophy.

In this quote-of-the-week post, I want to point out that gatekeeping of linguistic diversity in philosophy is not confined to journal refereeing and other elements of the profession that–although they are alleged to be objective and neutral–are increasingly recognized as partial and subjective. Rather, the imposition of these constraints on, and gatekeeping of, linguistic variation in philosophy (and elsewhere in academia) even occurs in aspects of the profession that are variously perceived to be mundane administrative procedures or purportedly diversity-enhancing measures, such as the boiler-plate university-wide administrative statements made in philosophy job postings.

Consider this paragraph (included in the DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] statement) of a job ad for a position in the Philosophy Department at Western University. The job ad recently appeared at PhilJobs, the leading job database for jobs in philosophy:

This position is subject to budget approval. Applicants should have fluent written and oral communication skills in English. The University invites applications from all qualified individuals. Western is committed to employment equity and diversity in the workplace and welcomes applications from women, members of racialized groups, Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, persons of any sexual orientation, and persons of any gender identity or gender expression.

The sentence that I have emphasized is especially problematic for the reasons already indicated (among others), reasons that are vividly elaborated by Mich in her aforementioned post and by Joshua St. Pierre and Johnathan Flowers in their respective contributions to The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability. That no member of the Philosophy Department at Western has flagged the sentence as problematic (discriminatory, biased, etc.) is not surprising given the dearth of disabled philosophers (and disabled philosophers of disability in particular) in the Western philosophy department and the profession of philosophy more generally.

In short, the sentence should not be included in a philosophy job posting (or any other academic job posting for that matter), nor should it have appeared in the PhilJobs database where it explicitly violates the antidiscrimination policy of the American Philosophical Association and hence of the PhilPapers consortium itself.