Disabilities in the Workplace: A Personalized Introduction

This post is the first on a subject I expect I may return to now and again. Since I have a disability and am in the process of adjusting to a new work setting, I’ve been thinking a lot about the subject lately and figured I’d start things off by introducing my perspective and raising some of the issues I want to consider in future posts. Ultimately, through this series of posts, I want to argue for the valuable role colleges and universities can play in creating equal opportunities for people with disabilities, both on campus and off.

Blindness Isn’t What You May Think

Although I am “legally blind,” if you met me at a conference, in a class, at a coffee shop, at a party, in line at the grocery store, or in any number of other everyday situations, you would never know that I couldn’t see very well. I don’t wear dark glasses (or any glasses at all, except when I’m reading or when everyone else is wearing sunglasses, too), don’t use a white cane, and don’t have a guide dog. I can read regular print in books and newspapers and on restaurant menus without accommodations, though my eyes get tired easily and I prefer some type of magnification (e-readers like the Kindle that offer text enlargement are the best invention ever!). While my visual acuity (what the eye doctor measures) is very poor, my functional vision (ability to use what I have) is very good. In most situations, I am able to “pass” as a sighted person, and, as a casual acquaintance, you would be surprised when I told you I couldn’t drive.

Georgina Kleege and Stephen Kuusisto have both written about their experiences as blind people passing for sighted, respectively in Sight Unseen and Planet of the Blind. I could write my own book on this subject (and may sometime, especially since some of my experiences differ from Kleege’s and Kuusisto’s), but there are some situations in which passing is impossible.

To give you a sense of what those situations might be, sit comfortably at your computer. Perhaps it is a laptop? Position yourself at a “normal” distance, so that you can easily read the screen and type. Now, slowly move away. Slide your chair back or get up and walk backwards, resting your laptop on a surface other than your lap but looking at the screen all the while. When you reach a point where you can tell that there are icons and text on the screen but cannot decipher the icons or read the text, you will have some idea of what I see when I am sitting a “normal” distance from a laptop. Cell phones are worse.

Blindness in the workplace

While many options do exist for making technology like laptops and cellphones accessible for the blind, someone who works in academia and has functional vision like mine can entirely evade them by evading the technology itself. I’ve never owned a laptop, because I have a desktop set-up at home that works excellently. With a 21” monitor positioned on a stand over my keyboard and just a few inches from my face, I can work comfortably without the need for text enlargement or text-to-audio software. When on campus, I would occasionally use computers in the adjunct office to check e-mail or in class to show a PowerPoint but never had to work for long periods of time on them. As I said in my previous post, in academia no one cares, as long as you get your work done. My dissertation director, who has normal vision, doesn’t have a laptop, either (nor a cellphone, unless something’s changed in the time since we last spoke).

However, when I showed up Friday for the first full day at my new job, it became immediately and painfully apparent to everyone just how blind I was. The laptop I am to use, besides just being a laptop, was configured in the worst way possible (icons and text on smallest settings, distracting wallpaper, transparent windows borders, along with room lighting that made the screen glare unmanageable). In addition to learning about my tasks while adjusting to Windows 7 and Office 2007 (I’ve been using XP and 2003), a modest challenge for anyone, I had to deal with an interface I could barely see.

The whole experience was overwhelming, awkward, and embarrassing.

Disclosure

I’ll end this post by saying that, after spending the weekend reconfiguring the view settings and getting comfortable with the software, I think things will be just fine. I have the option, if need be, of bringing in a monitor and keyboard and plugging them into the laptop and will be able to get a BlackBerry Bold, if it turns out the regular one doesn’t work out.

But disclosure remains a problem. How and when do people with “invisible” disabilities let employers know they might need reasonable accommodations? What if you aren’t even sure what you will need? What if “reasonable accommodations” aren’t possible?

To be continued…

The Most Important Thing You Learn in Graduate School Is Learning How to Learn (Or, Is it?)

If I don’t get fired for being technologically (or otherwise) incompetent the first week, this job may turn out to be OK, at least for the time being.

In my post earlier today, I mentioned that I had some fears about this job. One of them is my woefully behind-the-times tech knowledge. You see, in academe, nobody really cares all that much if you’re using an old (i.e. 2003) version of Office to write your articles, prep for class, keep your gradebook, or whatever, as long as you get your teaching and writing done. Nobody cares if you’ve ever dealt with the calendar function in Outlook, or ever used Outlook at all, as long as you more or less show up when and where you’re supposed to and more or less keep up with your e-mail correspondence. Nobody cares if you’re still using Windows XP or that you’ve never owned a laptop, nor does anyone care that you don’t ever use your old and very basic cellphone, much less whether you have a fancy new one, like a Blackberry or the latest iPhone.

In the nonacademic world, people do care. Of course, there are academic technophiles, but I am not one of them. I learn new software and how to use new devices only on an as-needed basis. Dear readers, I don’t even really give a crap about how the technology running this blog works, as long as I know just enough to cast my words out upon the interwebs (there will be no bells and whistles or fancy gadgets running here) for your reading pleasure. But, as the technophiles among you already know, technology changes. People who work in offices tend to keep up with these changes as a matter of course. In my new role, I will be using a laptop, with Windows 7 and Office 2007 on it, and I have been assigned a Blackberry (although I probably won’t have to use that very often). In my training session today, I was a bit overwhelmed. My tasks are not all that difficult, but it is Very Important that they get done – done promptly and done right. I am essentially the Joan Harris of this office, part executive secretary and part office manager (although the office itself is much, much smaller than the one Joan runs and in a less glamorous industry than advertising). If I screw up the calendar, Very Important Person misses Very Important Meeting. If I screw up travel arrangements, Very Important Person ends up in the wrong city without a car and misses Very Important Conference. If I screw up the expense reports or invoices, people don’t get reimbursed for travel and purchases or, in some cases, paid at all. I still don’t even know where to find all the stuff I need to use in these new MS applications, and I am kind of seriously freaking out.

Now, if you’re still reading, you may be wondering, “Why the frack did they hire this person who is so clearly technologically inept?” The answer is that I have a Ph.D. in English (!) and therefore ought to be able to figure out anything I don’t already know (!!?). How awesome is that?

Truthfully, I don’t think they realize just how utterly incompetent I am, but my boss was an undergraduate English major who had seriously considered going on for a Ph.D. and becoming a professor but wisely thought better of it. The other person who interviewed me, as well as the person I am replacing, were also both English majors and both currently write fiction. The colleague has published a novel. So, it was a good interview. We talked about writing. And critical theory (seriously, we did!), not secretary stuff.

They are going to be sorely disappointed and, if they do end up firing me, will probably never hire a Ph.D. again (sorry, fellow post academics, that I may end up leaving a very bad impression of us on the nonacademic world).

In fact, there is actually more (of a personally idiosyncratic nature) to the story of my technological ineptitude, at least when it comes to laptops and Blackberries, which speaks to the differences between working in academic vs. nonacademic environments, but I will save that for another post. Perhaps tomorrow, after my second and last training day and the Fancy Lunch to be held for the person I am to replace.

This weekend, I get to take the laptop home and will be giving myself a crash course in all that I never thought I’d want to know about the latest versions of Windows and Office. We will find out if it is indeed true that the most important thing you learn in graduate school is learning how to learn.

New Job Starts Today

I don't have time to write much now, but today is my first day! I won't be there for a full day, just a few hours to shadow the person I'm replacing, but I'm nervous anyway. Why am I nervous about being a secretary? I'll write more about that later, but not the least of my fears today is trekking through all this snow and ice to get there without slipping and breaking something. One of the things I've been looking forward to is being able to walk to this new job, as opposed to taking buses and trains as I've always done in the past (more about my carless existence later, too). It's about a mile and a half from home, which will be good exercise when the snow is gone, but sheesh! A snowstorm the night before my first day that's left everything encrusted with an icy, slushy, slippery coating? Oh, well. I did grow up in the Midwest and have walked through worse. Wish me luck on this adventure!

Do Your Students Know What an Adjunct Is?

How easy is it for a humanities department to replace an adjunct who quits a week and a half before spring classes start? As easy as it was for them to find me a week and a half before this past summer session began.

I didn’t want to teach this summer class, but I needed the money. I didn’t have a full-time job lined up and didn’t even know if I had any teaching assignments to look forward to in the fall (they wouldn’t finalize adjunct assignments until late July or early August). So, I agreed to teach a class I had never taught before, a class that was only partially in my area of specialization, a week before classes started. Because I needed the money.

The class only had six students enrolled, and under normal circumstances, this class, with a cap of 35, would have been cancelled, but four of the six students were paying out-of-state tuition. I guess the university was making enough money from the out-of-staters to run the class.

The only good thing about this class was that it was small. The intimacy motivated the students to come to class prepared and ready to talk, and the lack of intensive grading made it possible for me to spend time on the prep I should have been able to do in advance – though, of course, I couldn’t make up the time I had never had to actually select and organize the readings.

It wasn’t a great class, and although it went better than I had expected, I didn’t feel good about teaching it. Didn’t my students, for all the tuition they were paying, deserve to be taught by someone who had given time and thought and care to a well-planned syllabus? Didn’t they deserve a teacher in whom the university had invested as much as they themselves were investing in the class?

I don’t know the adjunct I replaced over the summer (*update* 7/4/2011: I actually learned later, after posting this originally, that I didn't replace an adjunct but someone tenured who just decided ze had more important things to do -- read more about my experience teaching this class here), just as I don’t know the person the department found to replace me this spring, and it doesn’t seem to matter that there is neither a sense of community nor commitment here. I’m sure they found someone glad to take my composition section, because it’s easy – for those of us who’ve taught comp many times – to fill in at the last minute. The syllabus is standardized, and the students are none the worse for having a different body in the room. But my other course? Well, my replacement’s book list suggests ze agreed to teach a course ze had never taught before a week before classes started for the same reason I did last summer. I had actually put some thought into this one and was somewhat looking forward to teaching it. If only my department could have made a small commitment to me, offered me four classes – even three – instead of two, I might have been less willing to flee. No longer a graduate student with loans deferred and family support available, I can no longer support myself on the salary from teaching just two classes.

But spring enrollments were down, and I guess departments like to spread things around among the adjuncts, keeping as many of us around as possible, you know, since we’re so prone to quitting.

We already know that the adjunct system doesn’t benefit adjuncts. In what possible way does it benefit students? It doesn’t. It benefits no one and nothing but the administration and their bottom line.

How do we change this system? Undergraduates are a key part of the solution. They have the numbers – and ultimately the financial power -- to demand change, but most of them don’t even know what an adjunct is.

If you’re currently an adjunct, come out to your students this semester. In the name of transparency and change, tell them who you are and why they should want their institution to make a greater commitment to you in terms of job security and salary. An investment in you is an investment in their education. A commitment to you is a commitment to them.

True Sagittarian

If you follow horoscopes, you know there’s been a lot of bluster lately about changes to the zodiaz. My favorite astrology guru, Rob Bresnsky of Free Will Astrology, says these supposed changes are bunk: “The zodiac isn't wrong. Your sign isn't changing. Ignore the misinformation.”

Whew. I’m still a Sagittarius. That’s reassuring, because if the zodiac really had changed, I'd be that weird new 13th sign. Besides, Rob’s reading for Sagittarius this week totally reaffirms that I’m doing exactly what I ought to be with my life right now:

“Dear Rob: All my life I've been passionate about the big picture -- learning how the universe works, meditating on why things are the way they are, and probing the invisible forces working behind the scenes. Too often, though, I'm so enamored of these expansive concepts that I neglect to pay enough humble attention to myself. It's embarrassing. Loving the infinite, I scrimp on taking care of the finite. Any advice? - Larger Than Life Sagittarian.” Dear Larger: You're in luck! Members of the Sagittarian tribe have entered a phase when they can make up for their previous neglect of life-nourishing details. In the coming weeks, I bet you'll find it as fun and interesting to attend to your own little needs as you normally do to understanding the mysteries of the cosmos.

Attending to my own little needs? Yay! I can say yes to taking a walk, playing with my cats, reading trash, watching TV, eating crunchy cheesy things, taking guilt-free naps, watching the snow melt, and generally celebrating the little things life offers without worrying about what it all means in the big picture.

What about you, dear readers? Are you true representatives of your signs?

Civility

*Updated below

Dear Fancy Press Editor:

I’m sorry my peer-review of that manuscript YOU invited me to review was two weeks and two days later than the date we INFORMALLY agreed upon.

You see, my life has been somewhat crazy lately, since we first communicated back in November. I know you don’t really care about my excuses, but what can I say? In just this short while, I have quit a job, turned my back on a career I’ve spent the last decade working towards, and stared down the abyss of financial freefall while desperately searching for a new job, finally finding a new job a lifeworld away from where I imagined I’d be right now even just a year ago.

Much as I wanted to do the review for you, it just wasn’t a priority, nor – in spite of my financial difficulties – was the $150 honorarium much of an incentive, given the amount of time it took me to read the manuscript carefully and write a detailed response. Recall, this was my first time doing this, and I wanted to do it well. I didn’t want to rush it if I didn’t have to.

So, I e-mailed you respectfully and asked for a little more time, and your reply indicated a little more time wouldn’t be a problem. We didn’t talk about what exactly “a little more time” meant. A few days? A few weeks? How could I know what your expectations were if you didn’t tell me? This past Friday, two weeks after that last exchange, you wrote asking how my review was progressing, still not saying anything about a deadline. I said I’d have it by end-of-the-day Monday (i.e. yesterday). But you never replied. I sensed you were displeased and losing patience with me, which is perhaps understandable, but couldn’t you have communicated this? I finally got the review finished and sent it off to you yesterday, as promised, but, again, you never replied.

Did you receive it? Was it acceptable? Was my feedback constructive enough to be useful to the author?

Despite my tardiness, I do actually care about whether I did a good job, and I’d appreciate some acknowledgement. Was two extra days too much to ask? If so, you should have told me, so that I didn’t waste the weekend making the effort to finish it. And what happens to the honorarium? I know I said it wasn’t much of an incentive, but, having finally completed the task, I would like my reward. Are you planning to stiff me? If there was some sort of explicit deadline, after which you would no longer be willing to acknowledge my effort, you should have stated that clearly in one of our earlier conversations.

Civility, you know, it goes a long way, especially for those of us still trying to figure out the rules of the academic playground, even as we are leaving.

If I ever do revise my dissertation into a book, I won’t be submitting the manuscript to you.

Respectfully,

recent Ph.D.

*Update: As it turns out, things are all good on this front. The editor doesn't think I'm an idiot at all and wasn't even too pissed off about the lateness of my review. I'm leaving the post up, though, as an expression of how anxiety-producing academic life can be.

Won’t Miss the Homework

One of the things I’m most looking forward to at my new job is not ever having to take work home with me. Nope. I will be in the office M-F 10-6, and I will be taking nothing home.

I was reminded of just how much I hate the homework aspect of university life when I finally got around, today, to finishing the peer-review of a book manuscript I was invited to do back in November. Now, having been invited to do this in the first place was a bit strange, since I have not yet written a book and my dissertation is a ways away from a book, should I even choose to revise it. But that’s another story. I agreed to do the review because the topic of the manuscript was interesting and very relevant to my own work, because I was curious about the process, and because I figured if Fancy Press was interested in this book, hey, they might consider mine, should that time ever come.

Well, let me just say, yes, I enjoyed reading the manuscript and thinking through what was essentially my argument for its publication, with a few questions and concerns along the way. However, after procrastinating until fall semester ended, then procrastinating because I was somewhat desperate to find a new job before spring semester started, then procrastinating because I found a job and was excited enough about that to start a blog – well, I will tell you, I have loathed having this task hanging over my head. This past week, doing this review is all I’ve thought about while doing things like cooking, going to yoga class, taking my significant other, Peaches, to the mall (because he doesn’t shop by himself) for some new shoes. My brain would repeat in fits and starts of anxiety, “Do the review! Go home and do the review! Stop wasting your time. The editor will think you’re an idiot. Just do it and get it out of the way. What a loser you are that you can’t even do a stupid book review! No wonder you’re becoming a secretary. Go write the review, because it’s the first and last you’ll ever do.”

That pressure to always be doing something work-related drove me crazy, and finishing this review today, as interesting an experience as it was, reaffirmed my choice. No, I will not miss that pressure! And I will get to read what I choose in my spare time – or not read at all, if I choose. And I will write what I please -- or not write at all.

I Quit My Job as an Adjunct and Became a Secretary

It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

This was my second year on the academic job market, the first year post Ph.D. Back in September, the MLA Job Information List confirmed my worst fears about the serious lack of tenure-track jobs for 2011-2012. There’s nothing new about the imbalance between available tenure-track jobs in the humanities and the large numbers of highly qualified candidates who want them, but the last two years have been appallingly bleak.

It is no longer possible to ignore the correlation between an increasing reliance on contingent faculty and the decreasing number of secure jobs that pay a living wage.

As a graduate student, I could accept the indignities of contingency because I was "still in school.” I relied on my family for financial support. Without it, I could not have finished graduate school, because I would not have been able to support myself on my TA – and later adjunct – salary. I am grateful for their support, but it shouldn’t be the responsibility of my family to subsidize the education of my students.

When the opportunity presented itself, I quit. I may or may not pursue a third attempt at the tenure-track job market this coming fall. I may or may not continue to pursue my research interests as an independent scholar. I may or may not like my new job, which starts at the end of this month, just as spring semester is starting.

But I will never, ever work as an adjunct again.

This blog will explore my choice and its consequences.