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The Society for Political Methodology’s annual meeting will be held at Brigham Young University, the group announced Monday, despite ongoing concerns about the campus climate for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender scholars. The society’s leaders said they’d given “insufficient forethought to matters of diversity” in allowing Brigham Young to host the meeting, chilling the participation of LGBTQ scholars and alarming the American Political Science Association’s Status Committee for Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgender Individuals in the Profession (a group not affiliated with the society).
Yet recent weeks have seen a series of “constructive, good-faith conversations” among the political science association’s LGBT Status Committee, Brigham Young and the society, the political methodology group said, yielding “what all parties believe is a positive outcome for 2018 and beyond.” The university has reaffirmed its commitment to welcoming visiting scholars in a spirit of inclusion and moved all events to an off-site location, for example, while the society is adopting a new diversity statement and formal code of conduct endorsed by the political science association's status committee. Host institutions of future conferences will be required to affirm these statements and conference participants will be required to sign the code of conduct. A plenary roundtable at the upcoming meeting also will discuss how to make the society more diverse and inclusive.
The society “apologizes for the way its host selection negatively affected professional opportunities for LGBTQ scholars,” its leaders said in a statement. “This was never intended and [the society] promises to be more attuned to diversity and inclusion in the future.”
