Teacher of college writing. WPA. disc golfer. bass fisherman. T1D. disabled academic. I tweet about ableism and academic neoliberalism bc I am fun at parties.
Most colleges and universities are not proactively considering the needs of disabled and chronically ill faculty, staff, and students at this point in the pandemic and never ever will because they legally don’t have to until the people they should be considering out themselves.
I don’t need an AI assistant.
I need free insulin. Less purposefully pointless bullshit in higher ed. A genocide to end. Better public health.
Not an AI assistant.
Paxlovid costs it’s manufacturers $13 to make a 5 day course, it’s research and development was FULLY Funded by the US Government.
They now charge $1651.99 for 5 days, a 126x markup.
This is privatised medicine, hell.
WHY IF EVERY UNIVERSITY IS SO TRUSTING OF STUDENT BEHAVIOR AS IT RELATES TO PREVENTING VIRAL SPREAD DO THEY ALL ALSO SPEND SO MUCH ON PLAGIARISM DETECTION AND PROCTORING SOFTWARE?
YES, I AM YELLING.
The absolute biggest fuck you to any and all academics who absolutely gave up on pandemic protections and now are like, “There’s no way this many people can be disabled and chronically-ill.”
Yesterday in a convo w/other teachers, I said students* are being disabled at a rate none of us have ever experienced, and that hit me really hard. We are working w/ students being made disabled & there’s just no recognition of that by higher ed institutions.
*teachers too
The entirety of the last few years has been directed at making clear that public health and safety are bad while extractive consumption is the only thing that matters.
The “return to normal” for many able-bodied people seems to be primarily about consumption of commodities outside the home, which seems to be their strongest belief of what constitutes freedom (for them, which is the freedom that most matters).
Having just tweeted about undiagnosed chronic illness, here’s your reminder that “official” recognition of disability for accommodations in higher ed usually require, among many things, money to pursue a diagnosis, a diagnosis, and outing of oneself as disabled.
One reason I’m staying for now is in hopes the pandemic news stays. I very much count on it. Has probably saved my life, tbh.
Have you met the people who do not get their pandemic news from Twitter? I mean, they tend to not get any pandemic news! And it shows!
I apologize for my radical logic here, but if I make it through the semester not getting COVID in the classroom as a disabled, chronically-ill faculty member and one of a limited number of maskers on campus, I will certainly not be celebrating that at indoor, maskless events.
737 million N95 masks hiding out in government storage during a viral pandemic.
Explain to me what I’m not understanding. Nearly two years in and 737 million masks have been waiting around for some other rainy day.
Faculty who are “not at risk” shouldn’t opt into teaching F2F. Everyone is at-risk. I appreciate that you want to look after people like me who are seriously at risk. But we should all stand in solidarity against anyone - fac, staff, student - experiencing unnecessary exposure.
Wearing a mask is one of the greatest labor solidarity acts — you’re literally lessening the chance of harm against fellow workers — and most people who claim to be in labor solidarity just decided not to.
Easier to be “collectively” against management than for the disabled.
Universities say F2F classes must continue because that’s what the customer wants, but they have also never asked the customer once this entire pandemic, so the claim could, you know, be questioned given absent methodology.
Sounds like academic dishonesty.
I’m not anxious about COVID.
It’s that I hate ableism and capitalism.
And both ableism and capitalism will never acknowledge the ongoing harms of COVID. Just absoutely easier for ableists and capitalists to gaslight anyone who is not complicit w/that project of ignoring harm.
The expectation that faculty execute a large degree of flexibility for students due to institutional public health failures is a labor issue that institutions absolutely don’t care about, which explains why the flexibility workload (and expectation of) falls on faculty and staff.
Why are DEI initiatives always about doing *new* things or bringing in lots of new people and never, at any degree, about looking in the mirror and figuring out how to aid the people already at the institution?
Here’s the thing, the actual fucking thing: any university(except those forbidden by law, though still could…) could decide to hold an event, a single fucking event, that is designated masked, that is specifically designated as masked for the purposes of inclusion.
The ableist, capitalist “return to normal” hasn’t just erased COVID. It has totally changed what counts as illness—or even “possibly medically concerning”—due to gaslighting by authorities but also due to the majority of people wanting to erase illness.
I hate it.
I can’t emphasize enough that referring to it as “lockdown” in your scholarship (or anywhere) is to align yourself with the rhetoric of really bad people and their goals of spreading disinformation about the pandemic and ultimately undermining public health interventions.
This is setting up to be the summer where everyone still taking COVID seriously will be completely forgotten by everyone else. We were all in it together, supposedly. And then they “understood.” And now we are just erased, a collective burden that is just easier to ignore.
Professors are reporting poor attendance, low engagement, and worrisome degrees of student disengagement.
So what are the highly-paid college and university leaders doing in response? Hell, they decided the pandemic was over. So this is the new, ignored normal?
There’s not a higher ed institution that can be doing valid DEI work if they are also rejecting masking. They can say DEI is broad & complex & masking is blah blah blah, but they are excluding or harming disabled people while also disabling more people, so the DEI claims are BS.
Disabled and/or Chronically-Ill People: “I don’t want it to be exposed to COVID because I’m already paying attention to my body *all the time* and do not need more input variables to complicate things.”
Able-bodied people w/symptoms: “It’s nothing. I barely notice [my body].”
The thing about the current violent rejection of pandemic risk that really destroys me is that able-bodied people co-opted the embodied positionality of being at-risk when it served them to do so and then they quickly deserted it and the at-risk when it best served them to do so.
My university is reporting zero faculty & staff COVID positives bc they are only counting tests administered at the University Health Clinic. I have been COVID positive since Sunday & submitted my positive test to the U as required. So, am I dead? (1/?)
I don’t think teaching ethical use of AI is going to effectively address the many harms of AI.
You can pedagogically spin it however you want. You go ahead and tell yourself the lies you need to hear.
Students tell me they use my class’s flexibility to deal w/other classes. And sometimes that creates problems for the collective design/work of the class & also creates unsettledness for me. But I’m just not going to get into material battles over students’ too limited resources.
I’ve analyzed why some first-year students have struggled this year and have come to the conclusion, after much thought, that the fact that the academic institutions they attend are ignoring large-scale illness did not help them it turns out.
Just saw an AQI advisory graphic broken into “very sensitive people” and “sensitive people” designations. If we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, it is that people love rhetorical invitations made by bad ppl to self-identify as being less at risk.
Ableism is a central, privileged value in academia because it is a central, privileged value of academics. And the ability to and choice to overwork without sure health consequences (for oneself) is the very heart of the ableism of academics.
The “unfit” get eliminated.
I think it’s bullshit for universities to hold classes remotely on Zoom for snow campus closures for *many* reasons, and especially because they are so quick to deploy an accommodation for themself that they purposefully restrict and make difficult for everyone else.
I was in grad school 2005-2013 and the advice about how to succeed as a tenure-track professor was “you’ve got to protect your own time.”
And, let’s be honest: that’s in direct opposition to the majority of advice on good teaching here in 2022.
Students are taking too many credit hours. Students are taking too many credit hours. Students are taking too many credit hours. Students are taking too many credit hours. Students are taking too many credit hours. Students are taking too many credit hours.
[not their fault]
And there can’t be any recognition because their insurance carriers said so. They can’t admit their own harms, even if they wanted to, which they don’t want to, but couldn’t regardless.
So it is all massive gaslighting all of the time.
Students are taking too many credit hours. You can collect or fabricate all the data you want & you can create as many in-semester, triage interventions — poor band aids, mostly— but I’m telling you, dollars to donuts, that students are certainly attempting too many credit hours.
Imagine the decrease in viral transmission if people who have the privilege of substantial holiday travel would just mask from point A to B and then back from B to A.
When you are traveling this week, please wear a mask! Aside from the many potential long term health impacts viruses can cause, it really sucks to be sick over the holidays. One of the best ways to protect yourself and others is by wearing a high quality mask!
Fuck the privileged, white, able-bodied people who are always responsible for deciding (and most influencing decisions) that other people’s lives don’t matter.
And fuck Joe Biden twice.
The CDC is no longer recommending Americans to stay home after testing positive for COVID-19, a major shift in policy that comes as much of the country has moved on from the height of the pandemic.
University just sent an email about ongoing stress on campus electrical grid due to heat wave and decison to increase building temps to attempt to alleviate stress, so maybe we should talk about AI use in education in relation to that, eh?
To my lovely faculty colleagues in academia:
If you are really worked up about plagiarism (incl AI writing) while also contributing to or ignoring the material learning conditions in which students find themselves drawn to cheating, that’s a really big problem.
Just a reminder that the idea that college faculty can brainwash students is only believed and forewarded by authoritarians who can imagine a position of power working no other way. It’s circular reasoning.
I’ll never forget how pandemic mitigations ended because able-bodied liberals decided they were comfortable with the level of protections the vaccine offered the individual.
An entire group of selfish people who entirly define themselves as better than “the other side.”
Thinking about all the disabled college faculty who have made massive accommodations for students bc that’s how inclusion works within a higher education system that just sees disabled faculty as, at best, less desirable cogs.
“Hybridity” where those who want to mask are forced online because of a lack of masking by those who get to be in person and basically get everything they want is something I have strong feelings about.
This 2017 piece on what bullets do to bodies is one of best “longform” pieces I’ve ever read: “The gun debate would change in an instant if Americans witnessed the horrors that trauma surgeons confront every day.”
#ThisIsOurLane
I respect the right of anyone to continue masking if they wish, but most of us don't want to, and it's wrong to try to persuade us otherwise by telling lies about covid - or mpox
Very recently a doctor of mine made the point, paraphrased, that my health is the best it has been in 4(!) years because I have been able to largely avoid the daily cumulative lived minutiae of ableism and capitalism so, no, I am not here for your return to normal at all.
It’s not that I don’t think I’ll get well. It’s that I’m always already chronically ill & will remain so for the rest of my life, whether or not I caught COVID. Chronic illness leads a person to deeply desire more than anything never encountering more illness.
I respect academics who mask at academic conferences with almost no masking and I recognize that there are power dynamics at play that require people do so.
That said, I don’t want to be “in community” with selfish, unmasked, tenured academics, so I won’t be. Fuck them.
Universities can’t have honest conversations about faculty members’ roles in supporting students bc then we might end up having discussions about pay, workload, priorities, supporting pedagogy, etc.
[This is what I think about a lot of the tweets I see abt HE in 2023.]
Universities are like “how can we act like we are supporting students?” after rejecting masking and just absolutely fermenting COVID for at least three semesters now while also ignoring that most of their students have had COVID and many continue to have multiple infections.
The idea of personal COVID risk assessment sends me into a rage. I don’t want to live in that world. Or, more specifically, I don’t want to live among such people. I hate them.
This FAQ syllabus format done got real in the “plagiarism” section. We need to be more transparent with students about institutional bullshit that affects them.
I just want centrist Dems to admit that Biden has deserted at-risk, chronically-ill, and disabled people.
There can certainly be two bad, immoral, ethically-bankrupt, unqualified candidates in a head-to-head election.
I think the thing for me about AI use in education, beyond the very clear ethical quandaries, is that it has clearly been designed to do bad & to do harm, explicitly and purposefully so, and some educators are like, “it’s a tool that can be used ethically. Let’s lean in to that.”
I hate grades. I hate that grading exists, normatively, the same as it always has here in this pandemic. I hate that people think they can grade ethically and validly in a pandemic. I hate that many institutions are likely not talking about this.
Adjuntification and the first-year writing course are deeply interwoven. It would seem that if universities are not willing to fund secure employment for this class universities claim to really value, then this required class should not be a required class.
Masking would be one of the absolutely easiest acts of access people could enact for others but a commitment to eugenics requires the violent rejection of masking and the violent rejection of masking enacts eugenics.
“COVID is here to stay so deal with it.” “The genocide of Palestinians is here to stay so deal with it.” “AI is here to stay so deal with it.”
Should we discuss all the things that are never here much less to stay and what all the “here to stay” people are complicit with?
I can’t tell you to massage your school’s rules regarding accommodations. I will tell you that basing accommodations on the existence of official paperwork is itself discriminatory.
Nearly everything higher ed leaders are prioritizing is in the service of a return to normal — or a performance of the return to normal — and the erasure of the pandemic and its harms.
As a disabled faculty member, I’m unapologetically not participating in that bullshit.
The dismal rate of “voluntary” masking on campus, which the university has invited people to do if they so choose, is informing my response to other voluntary labor I’m invited to do.
“Choose to work from home” reminds me that *the* lesson I’ve really learned from the pandemic is lots of financially fine, white “liberals” are actually socially libertarian and fiscally libertarian explicitly because they’ve run the risks and benefits “to themselves” analysis.
Just to follow up: the brand of person I was referring to is someone who tells people to fuck off if they choose to work from home while sick. I don’t find that persuasive, I find it unhinged.
Long Covid is real, tragic, and deserves more attention (I had a post-Covid condition
Academia, in all kinds of ways, demands a degree of overwork situated in and bolstered by ableism, and I just find that I hate it and want nothing to do with it.
Lots of people don’t mask bc of ableism. Anything disability related, even the thought of disability or acknowledging disability including the real possibility of disability, is an inconvienace. Masks are an inconvenience in this word. Masks are a reminder of disabled people.
I’d happily join a professional organization that never holds F2F conferences. Seems like the first step toward inclusion. The deep attachment to F2F conferences is evidence of classism and ableism in higher ed.
How many students provided you with official accommodations paperwork versus how many are you explicitly accommodating based on what students have shared with you?
That second reality is one universities just ignore because they can. They wish we all would. It’s ableism.
I like how the normal has normalized phrases like “a Zoom link has been provided below for those unable to attend in person” and people think they are doing accessibility and inclusion.
I *love* how the privileging of normate ability is just explicitly announced. Purposefully.
My orientation to almost everything is that going back to 2019 is not the way forward to a better world, so I, therefore, do not labor toward recreating 2019 nor do I support work related to doing so.
I don’t have answers but I know 2019 is certainly not the answer.
I’m begging academics who are generally interested in AI use for academic purposes and for application in their own scholarship to do the necessary research on the energy consumption of such technologies.
Being knowledgeable of the harms is a reasonable expectation.
And sometimes the selections taken from the officially-recognized accommodations buffet listed on the official paperwork are inadequate for the needs of the student given their condition/disability.
You don’t hear about academic conference accessibility anymore. It was a brief fad, if that. Now you just hear from the people who attend the on-site conferences who have opted in. It’s just academic libertarianism, the path of least resistance and most reward.
I hate the ableism of 2023 academia. I’m not giving up and I’m never giving in, but I hate it, and I hate those who are complicit, especially those who have secure employment thanks to ableism.
Shout out to and a thanks to all the disability activists who decided to stay on Twitter when liberals basically demanded that everyone flee as an act of, ummm, I guess, resistance.
I’m *very* pro-masking and am masking on campus and do wish more students masked. But I also keep reminding myself that the message from everyone in power at all levels is “buy your own fucking masks if it matters to you.”
I miss “teaching” and “not teaching” days. Now there are just all the days where I sit at the dining room table and look at a computer monitor. I appreciate being safe. I’m just tired of it all, for everyone.