Physical Requirements for Academic Jobs?

Shelley Tremain over at Discrimination and Disadvantage draws attention to the fact that academic jobs in some US institutions now have physical requirements written into the essential criteria, which means that disabled people are automatically disqualified.

In the past four months, I have seen two postings for jobs in philosophy that stipulated physical requirements such as “ability to stand and deliver a lecture” and “full sight and hearing capacity.” In the one case, these stipulations were set out on a university HR site that was linked from a philosophy department’s job posting. In the other case, the stipulations were included in the very job posting itself. In both cases, the institutions in question were American universities. Philosophers must adamantly oppose the use of such criteria in the job postings for positions in their own departments and on their university’s HR page. These criteria are in direct violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Shelley’s article, which contains many other examples of the practice, draws on another by David Perry, a disability scholar and historian at Dominican University, which was recently published by Al-Jazeera, America. Pretty shocking.