Journalist – Historian – Speaker
I’ve written a lot about ableism in job ads. Here’s one from last year. I’ve never seen this before – I see it as a compromise move. For a disability services associate director at Texas Christian University: Physical Requirements (With or Without Accommodations): Visual acuity to read information from computer screens, forms and other printed …
Dominant Narrative: Conservative students on liberal campuses are ostracized and marginalized and it isn’t fair and there should be balance. Data: Conservative students at UW Madison are doing fine. Politically conservative students instead were more likely to report feeling safe, respected and like they belong than students holding other political views. Conservative students also were …
NEW at Pacific Standard. Please click over and share! Betsy DeVos and the GOP more generally say that we need to treat students like customers. Three responses. 1) What’s so great about being a customer if you’re not a billionaire? 2) The student’s relationship to their educational institutions and the people who work there cannot …
My university, Dominican University, has declared itself a sanctuary campus. We have a long history as a national leader in supporting the rights of undocumented students to access higher education, including regular fund-raising to make that possible. In 2014 I wrote: Over the last few years at my Roman Catholic university, we have begun to …
The New Yorker has a piece on formerly incarcerated people going to UC Berkeley. It’s long and interesting, with many good tidbits about life in prison, life in college, structural obstacles, but also genuine opportunities. But I want to quote a few bits on how awesome books are. This is Murillo. At first, he read the …
Three stories. 1. #SupportTheStrike – Rosa Ines Rivera, a cook at Harvard School of Public Health, writes for the NYTimes that Harvard doesn’t pay her enough to afford healthcare. On my way to work each morning, I pass a building with the inscription: “The highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights …
I am teaching of version of Western civilization which my students meet in person about 75% of the time and about 25% of the time online. I love it. I use that online time and space to build connections among the students that in fact it might not happen in class and also to find …
Yoni Appelbaum, who has a PhD in history and is Politics editor for The Atlantic, has a new piece on the importance of liberal arts education for people who want to thrive in business. American undergraduates are flocking to business programs, and finding plenty of entry-level opportunities. But when businesses go hunting for CEOs or …
I have a new Storify on disability and diversity at Pomona college. Pomona passed a new “diversity and inclusion” initiative for tenure and promotion, which has received a lot of press. Disability has not, to my knowledge, been mentioned. I’m interested in the general lack of overlap between diversity initiatives and disability services. I think it …
As I wrote about the job discrimination ads last month for Al Jazeera America​, I kept thinking about the hashtag #ILookLikeAProfessor and Kelly J. Baker​’s work. My thesis is that the inadvertent part of this was based, at least in part, on people who had just never considered that a disabled person might be able …