This was the message President Bill Chace delivered June 21 in his first address to the Employee Council. The University initiated criminal background checks for newly hired staff in September 1994. A staff committee in Emory Hospital had previously recommended the background checks to provide a more secure environment in the hospital. Staff hired before September 1994 are not affected by the policy.
Since that time, several Council members have characterized Emory's policy of requiring criminal background checks for new staff but not for new faculty as being inequitable. Although Chace attended the Council meeting to discuss the state of the University and to answer Council members' questions, Council President Kay Pendleton asked him to address the criminal background check issue specifically.
"I don't see any prospect that faculty will undergo [criminal background] checks," Chace said. "I believe they feel it would be an incursion on their privacy and that they would argue convincingly that the checking done in the faculty hiring process is so thorough that the risk is minimal. I think that if Emory did this, it would jeopardize the faculty hiring process."
Chace said he believes many of the best faculty candidates would refuse to submit to criminal background checks, which could have implications for the continued increase in quality of Emory's teaching and research.
"The faculty are different," Chace told the Council. "They are the single most special employees at a university. They are the longest lasting employees and they have a special role and function. It won't work to try and minimize that." The president added that his comments were not intended to diminish the crucial role that staff play in the life of the University or to "hurt anyone's feelings."
One Council member asked Chace if excluding faculty from criminal background checks reflects an elitist perspective on the part of the University.
"In a way, there is kind of an elitism on university campuses," Chace said. "Faculty have an elite role in a university. But that doesn't mean that they should be freely exempt from everything."
Merely having a criminal conviction on one's record does not necessarily mean that a job candidate will not be hired, according to Associate Vice President for Human Resources Alice Miller, who also attended the meeting. She said that since the policy was adopted, a relatively small number of candidates have been denied employment as a result of the background checks. But those denials of employment have been due to applicants' lying on their job applications about having criminal records, rather than the records themselves.
--Dan Treadaway