What do you mean your wife won’t take care of them?

I’m so glad it was my mother, and not my dad, who had to attend conferences as part of her job. I stayed half-days with host families and spent the remainder of the time playing pinball with nice gentlemen who turned out to be professors (how could I know, they didn’t wear white coats), making drawings on overhead projector sheets, and getting unasked-for, fantastic homework help from people who were wildly overqualified.

Conferences were way more fun then. If I attend one now, I have to listen to talks, and there’s definitely less pinball.

The mind boggles, indeed. Do institute directors also ask men to, I don’t know, take libido suppressors for a month? Because you never know, it might just interfere with the science.

It’s not the NEH that’s making this requirement. It’s the organizers who have put this seminar together and gotten NEH funding for it.
Yes, it’s egregious. In fact, according to the NEH website listing all of this summer’s seminars and institutes:

Endowment programs do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, disability, or age. For further information about NEH’s EEO policy, write to the Equal Employment Opportunity Officer, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20506. TDD (for the hearing impaired only): 202‑606‑8282. [source]

It looks like there are perhaps 3 possibilities (in other words, these are the 3 summer seminars taking place in Europe this summer, as far as I can tell):

“Representations of the ‘Other’: Jews in Medieval Christendom,” in Oxford.
“Cultural Hybridities: Christians, Muslims & Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean,” in Barcelona.
“The ‘Falls of Rome’: The Transformations of Rome in late Antiquity,” in Rome.

Just for clarification, are we certain that they wouldn’t have asked a man who wanted to bring his child along to provide proof of childcare arrangements? Though frankly I don’t see why it’s their business even if they *would* ask the same intrusive question of a male philosopher.

I see your point, Laurel.

It’s a level of interfering bullshittery that makes one suspect bizarre sexism, certainly; but above that it may be some really odd legal requirement – probably not an English one but I can imagine a Spanish or Italian govt passing a law about compulsory childcare arrangements that only a foolishly literal-minded Anglo-Saxon would expect to take seriously…

> It’s not the NEH that’s making this requirement. It’s the organizers who
> have put this seminar together and gotten NEH funding for it.

So? That doesn’t exempt the NEH from being required to obey US federal laws and regulations. See the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for an analogous example.

Cranky

Name and shame.

Complaining about this stuff going on in private is not going to help matters in the slightest. As it is we don’t know how the situation was resolved. People send out idiot boilerplate all the time without thinking about it, often without reading it.

My guess is that the professor is in a good position to call their bluff. If the US government is funding this it is no doubt subject to United States laws, and I’m pretty sure that this would not pass legal muster. At worst there will be laws banning gender and marital status discrimination, and caselaw which makes this sort of behavior fall under that description. At best there might be more specific language banning this sort of thing. The NEH itself might somewhere have rules that would forbid this, without having to look for more general statutes or regulations not specific to the NEH.

Probably a letter to the NEH itself would resolve this rather quickly.

This is pretty appalling behavior and deserves hard push-back.

‘Just for clarification, are we certain that they wouldn’t have asked a man who wanted to bring his child along to provide proof of childcare arrangements? ‘

Perhaps Laurel’s response to this is sufficient; but speaking for myself – a male philosopher, with two children – I am pretty much 100% certain that they wouldn’t have asked a man to do the same thing. No-one has EVER asked me to provide proof of my child care arrangments as a condition of participation as a condition of particpation in an academic event; and none of my male colleagues has ever told me of anything similar. That’s after being in the profession for 10-15 years depending lon how one counts these things.

(It’s somewhat tangential to this, but perhaps worth saying for the handful of people know me as a person and not just a nym, that one of the nice but very unusual things about the academic community I work in is that I’ve occasionally been asked, informally, when invited to particpate in a weekend event, whether I’d like any help in arranging childcare. Normally I haven’t, but it’s nice ot be asked. Rare as hen’s teeth in the academic world more generally, I’d imagine.)

Being philosophers, are they not more likely to have arranged for someone to feed the mail, clean the cat…..?

I think it’s fine to require, e.g., attendance from all participants. It’s fine to make funding contingent on full attendance and participation.

Beyond that, I am not really seeing how it’s their concern whether the participant has retained a nanny, left the child with his grandparents, or enrolled him in day care, or has no children at all. Presumably she is an adult who has in the past proved to be capable of caring for her son and is the best position to judge how much child care she’ll need to participate fully in the conference.

leederick 04.11.10 at 2:18 pm

“I do, I’m not defending the particular way they went about this. But surely ensuring that people who are funded arrange their personal circumstances so that they they can participate in the seminar they’re being funded to attend is perfectly appropriate?”

Actually, you pretty much are. But besides that, I’m going to take a teeeeny chance here and declare that a conference or organization which required *all* participants with children to certify that they’ve made childcare arrangements to the [completely unspecified] satisfaction of the Institute directors or lose funding, *and* which gave participants 12 hours’ notice of this, would be infamous in the academic and philosophical communities for doing so.

I’ve been to a number of conferences/workshops in which it has been made very clear that full attendance is an expectation (one coming up next week actually, though why anyone would be bunking off in this particular case is a mystery). Never has anyone gone further, to inquire about my children, my liking for sunny weather, or whether I have distracting friends/relatives in the city. I’ve always assumed that the punishment would be some mild form of shunning and not getting re-invited. Anything stronger would seem excessive to me (and I have been at conference/workshops where expectations were clear and others did fail to live up to them, with pretty much these consequences). I’d be much more worried about people trying to enjoy themselves than trying to care for their kids, unless this is a workshop with a very unusual set of participants.

“And the people [complaining about the inappropriate paternalism of a blanket policy] would almost certainly be exactly the same people who are bending over backwards to try to give some colour of reasonableness to what’s being done this case.”

That’s just nonsense. My remarks are aimed at comments like #5 and #18. They seemed to be saying that not only are the actions wrong in this case (which I agree with), but that even any consideration of childcare arrangements as part of a blanket policy would be inappropriate (which I don’t agree with). So, you’re just wrong: there are poeple who make a point of not only being very hostile to this example, but of also of being very hostile to a more legitimate policy. In fact, that’s what inspired my original comment.

One way and another, it really is not the business of a seminar-organiser to worry about what participants are going to do with their children, any more than it is their business to concern themselves with the care and feeding of a budgerigar or an elderly dependent relative. Unless, for example, the child is being accommodated at the organisers’ expense, and local law (bizarrely, intrusively) requires the childcare question – but in the absence of concrete evidence of such a local requirement, I’d go with “mind your own dam’ beeswax, feller”.

It’s not exactly the same thing, but this reminds me of when I worked, as a civilian, for a US Navy shipyard. I’d been told by my foreman that his superior had ordered him to write me up for any little thing. (I’d pointed out a safety violation and become unpopular with the management level.) As a result, I ended up in a grievance hearing with the General Foreman for being one or two minutes late a few times. He asked what I gathered was a standard question, “Do you have another job outside the shipyard?”
I answered, ” I am a single parent of two children.”
He answered, “Well, your job at the shipyard has to come first.”

So, you’re just wrong: there are poeple who make a point of not only being very hostile to this example, but of also of being very hostile to a more legitimate policy.

People disagree that a policy that says “prove to our unspecified satisfaction that you have no distractions that would make your attendance difficult” is reasonable. It’s not about being hostile to a legitimate policy; it’s about disagreement over whether such a policy would be legitimate.

And, as almost everyone has noted, this NEH seminar request is well out of the ordinary. There is no presumption in general that in order to attend a conference one must first submit to a background check.

Yeah two points that reinforce what others are saying. It is totally unreasonable to single out child care when no one has to prove to the conference satisfaction that they have taken care of other possible distractions. Maybe someone has not budgeted for food, presuming once they are there they can find a way to get fed. No one is asked to prove they are taking enough money to feed themselves. So a policy that singles out child care and requires proof for that but nothing else is discriminatory.

I would add that even with legitimate requirements that it is unreasonable to require that people meet unspecified standards. “You tell us what you have done, and we will tell you if it is satisfactory. And if not you can’t come.” That is not a normal standard you have to meet for any requirement I’m aware of in attending a conference. Also “meet a demanding standard you were not given notice of in 12 hours or you are out” is also absurd. So not only is the particular requirement discriminatory, the vagueness of the standards and impossibly-to-meet shortness of the notice is downright hostile.

No idea where those strike-outs came from.

Just to let you know: everything we have posted on the subject at Feminist Philosophers has been with the permission of the woman who was being required to prove her childcare arrangements.

It now looks like (thanks in part to your efforts, Kieran– many thanks!) the NEH has been contacted by Inside Higher Ed and expressed their opposition to the policy: .

Last I heard, the woman in question was planning to contact the EOO at the NEH to ask about the policy, so hopefully that will be going well. (She has not yet heard back about whether her childcare arrangements were judged to be acceptable.)

I immediately wondered if this is a response to someone’s previously bringing a kid along to the conference and having said kid hang around in a disruptive fashion during the proceedings. In which case this is typical of lousy (and also sexist) management: instead of dealing directly with the individuals who HAVE caused a problem (for example by asking them to remove the annoying child and pointedly giving them the number of a local nanny service), treat everyone who you perceive might possibly cause this kind of problem in the future (read women with kids) as a potential screwup.

Then again, if I were she I would not have mentioned bringing the child along because of precisely this kind of idiocy. Men typically have much more luxury about injecting knowledge of their parenthood into working situations. Women are much better advised to say “I have an appointment” than “I have to pick up the kid.”