Thursday, September 06, 2007

Equal Opportunity (For Mormons Only)

An alert reader passed along a job advertisement that blew my mind. It's a fairly standard job description for a faculty position in psychology at Brigham Young University. At the end of the ad is the equal opportunity statement, which reads as follows:
Brigham Young University is an Equal Opportunity Employer sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and requires observance of Church standards. Preference is given to members of the sponsoring Church.
So does this mean that whether you are a white Mormon or a black Mormon, you have equal opportunity, but if you're not Mormon, you're screwed? This does not sound very "equal opportunity" to me. Am I missing something?

5 comments:

  1. In the UK that would be positive discrimination :). Happens quite a lot here given the Race Relations issue has gone haywire.

    I believe the equal opportunities arise only to members of the sponsoring church :)

    Dr Rita Pal

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  2. It's a private school so who cares?

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  3. I don't really care who they hire. Seems to me they should take the Equal Opportunity statement out if they don't really offer Equal Opportunity -- that's my gripe.

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  4. It just means they provide an equal op for those who observe church standards. Which means if you observe their standards and are in fact Mormon, then yes, you've got a job no matter who you are, but no exception to the observation of church standards rule, period. Don't you love fine print? ha this stuff drives me crazy.

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  5. The word used is "preference". That means, given two candidates with equal amounts of experience and educational background, and both of which agree to comply with the universities standards, one of which is a member of the LDS church, and one is not, then preference would be given to the candidate who is LDS. They are not going to pass over a published PhD with 20 years of experience in his field to hire a guy with a Bachelors degree and 2 years of experience just because the less qualified candidate is LDS. That would be ridiculous.

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