Ms. Mentor
Should
I Show Them My Ills?
by Emily Toth
Question: I have a hidden
disability that can flare up unexpectedly and make me dizzy or
send me streaking for the bathroom. It’s
mostly controllable by medication, which I use for on-campus job
interviews.
Do I have to tell possible
employers about it? I would like to be honest and brag that I’ve still managed to get a Ph.D., publications,
and a teaching award, despite my disability. But I also know about
prejudices. Should I try to pass as “nondisabled”?
Answer: Ms. Mentor has
a dream—that one day all campuses will
feature a rainbow of people moving easily through wide hallways for
wheelchairs, finding sensor-equipped bathroom fixtures, using computers
adapted for voices as well as fingers ... and proclaiming a community
attitude that everyone is welcome.
But such a utopia is
far away. The Americans With Disabilities Act, passed in 1990 has
helped get parking spaces, better bathrooms, ramps, and many other “reasonable accommodations” for
disabled people and yet....
The bitter truth is that it probably will be much easier for you
to get hired if you hide your disability.
Most people, including
academics, think disability is rare, but it’s not. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, a
fifth of Americans are people with disabilities. They are the nation’s
largest minority group, and anyone can join in a minute. All it takes
is a bad fall in the shower, or one drunk driver, and you’re
a lifetime member.
Another myth is that
differently abled or physically challenged workers are “too costly.” In
fact, says a recent Cornell University study, most workplace improvements
take only a little thought and a few dollars: phone headsets, easy-to-use
software, desk rearrangements. Academe, with its movable schedules
and student helpers and online courses, is ideal for people with
deafness and other disabilities to share their knowledge.
But the big barrier,
the Cornell study shows, is attitude— fear
and loathing. Only people who really care will do the right thing,
like the very poor rural African Americans, a century ago, who began
training their blind children in music. Their success stories include
Clarence Carter, the Blind Boys of Alabama, and Ray Charles. “Too
costly” is really about a rigid and stingy perception of who
is worthy and who is not.
Ms. Mentor calls it
a very Puritan belief—the idea that if
you’re not perfectly able, it is somehow your fault, and you
deserve to be punished. (You didn’t wear your seatbelt, or
you devoured a Whopper and enjoyed it.) In various pockets of righteousness
around the United States, Ms. Mentor’s loyal readers have been
scolded by strangers for eating meat or enjoying a beer. A judgmental
tone has even crept into celebrities’ lives. When actress Maureen
Stapleton died recently of lung disease, the obituaries all said
that she was a smoker—making the moral very clear.
Those with visible disabilities,
what Rosemarie Garland Thompson calls “extraordinary bodies,” know
about being stared at, stigmatized, patronized, and denied insurance.
But even the most virtuous, careful, and luckily insured Americans
may have secret disabilities, such as migraines, asthma, allergies,
or epilepsy.
For job interviews,
they’ll pack their inhalers, pills, canes,
and sun hats—and hope they won’t have to use them in
public and be outed and seen as vulnerable. Too many job ads ask
for “dynamic and energetic” people—which translates,
Ms. Mentor knows, into “young” and “able-bodied.” Where
is the acknowledgment that brilliant minds can come in all kinds
of packages?
That doesn’t happen at many a hiring meeting, according to
Ms. Mentor’s spies. More often, there are comments like, “Can
Dr. Blind handle the reading load?” Or “Maybe Dr. Chair
would rather be at a more accessible campus?” Or “Dr.
Odd’s clearly got some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder.” All
such comments are illegal and bigoted, but they do affect hiring
decisions.
Which is why Ms. Mentor
admits this sad truth: that people who “pass” are
more apt to get jobs. She knows heroic faculty members who have concealed
their dialysis, their chemotherapy, and their prosthetic limbs, until
after they were taken seriously for their intellectual achievements.
And she knows that outraged readers will say she’s promoting
dishonesty (“Take me as I am”). Perhaps she is, in an
end-justifies-the-means kind of way. She would rather have people
with disabilities able to bore from within, sharing their deep sensitivity
and their great knowledge, than languishing, unemployed, on the outside.
Are there exceptions,
people who’ve always been “out?” James
M. Lang, for one, did not consult Ms. Mentor when he wrote his first
book about his own disability (Learning Sickness: A Year With Crohn’s
Disease). After his second book, Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons
From the First Year, also appeared, he won tenure at Assumption College,
where he’ll be able to share his insights for the rest of his
teaching life.
Ms. Mentor lauds Assumption
College and James Lang, and urges hiring committees not to look
for oddities in candidates — such as
twitches, limps, or eyestrain — and to be wary of the mind-set
described by Lennard J. Davis: “We live in a world of norms.” Being “normal” or
ordinary should never be a goal of education.
Ms. Mentor prefers teachers
and students to be unique and extraordinary, to be leaders in a
world where people can sashay, limp, or wheel themselves about—keeping
pace with the slowest and helping them along. We will all be disabled
eventually, if we do not die first. People with disabilities may
have to conceal their vulnerabilities for now, but not when there
are enough of them, and enough people with open hearts and minds.
Ms. Mentor knows we could all use more of those.
