COMMITTEE FOR THE ANNUAL MEETING CODE OF CONDUCT
ASOR President Susan Ackerman and Vice-President Sharon Herbert are pleased to announce they have formed a committee to develop an ASOR Code of Conduct for the Annual Meeting. The committee members — drawn from the membership of ASOR’s six standing governance committees and the Initiative on the Status of Women — are Helen Dixon, Emily Hammer, Mara Horowitz, Ian Jones, R. Scott Moore, Tine Rassalle, Alison Thomason, Lynn Welton, and Vanessa Workman. ASOR Trustee Emily Miller Bonney serves as the committee chair.
We envision that this Code of Conduct will address multiple issues concerning the safety and well-being of participants at the ASOR Annual Meeting including but not limited to (1) discrimination based on sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, age, and religion; (2) harassment, including (a) sexual harassment, (b) harassment that creates a hostile or intimidating environment, (c) harassment that demeans a person or group of persons and that the person responsible knew or reasonably ought to have known would cause the target to be humiliated, intimidated, or otherwise gratuitously harmed; and (d) harassment that functions implicitly or explicitly to limit others’ participation in the Annual Meeting’s program and associated activities; (3) assault, including sexual assault. The code should also include plans for emergency management of such incidents at the Annual Meeting.
At the same time the proposed Code of Conduct will recognize that conference participants have protected rights to free speech. The drafters will endeavor to achieve the appropriate balance between asserting ASOR’s commitment to the principle that conference attendees should be free from discrimination, harassment and assault while still able to exercise their academic freedom.
Overall, we hope an ASOR Code of Conduct for the Annual Meeting should set forward a series of principles for respectful and professional behavior to which every participant at the ASOR Annual Meeting should aspire, as well as a series of best practices that ASOR should strive to enact. We are grateful to Emily Miller Bonney and to the members of the Annual Meeting Code of Conduct Committee for their work on this issue, which began already last month. Their goal — and ours — is to have a policy in place for the November 2019 ASOR Annual Meeting in San Diego.
