The Echoes of History, a Personal Professional Meditation

Abstract

CLA JOURNAL 141 The Echoes of History, a Personal Professional Meditation Therí A. Pickens Hello Therí. This is Jill Reich calling from Bates College. I’m very pleased to be calling and… and… uh perhaps you can think why and that is that we would very much like to have you to join us on the faculty here at Bates. So, I’m calling to talk about an offer. Um, it’s Tuesday afternoon about uh 5:30. I’ll be in the office for about another half hour. You can reach me tomorrow at uh 207-786-6066. I’m afraid I’m going to be at meetings most of the evening. Uh, but I’m going to send you an email and, uh, we really look forward to talking and hope that uh we can work something out so that you can join us here at Bates. Thanks, Therí, and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye-bye. This voicemail is from Tuesday, March 8, 2011. It was a moment of professional triumph. It was also a moment of fear. I had an offer for a tenure-track job, but I had to negotiate the parameters. I hasten to add that few of us know the art of negotiation and seldom do we learn in graduate school. Though I had great mentors (still do!), this process was daunting nevertheless. I needed to negotiate aspects of my career that most junior faculty think about: a base salary increase, course reduction for the first two years, start-up funds, teaching development, and a deeper reserve of conference travel funds. Books like The Academic Job Handbook advise job seekers on best practices in contract negotiation. Noticeably absent, for me at least, was advice on how best to negotiate aspects of my career related to my disability: digital access to my classroom so that I could teach remotely in case of illness, physical access to both my office and classrooms in case of inclement weather, accessible housing within scooter distance to the campus, increase in the yearly conference funding allowance because traveling with a disability is expensive. When Bates’ former Dean of Faculty Jill Reich called to “work something out,” I am certain that she knew she would need to consider my disability. Nonetheless, joining the faculty at Bates seemed like it would be an exercise in trying to create a separate but equal working space1 in a place where ableism was assumed to be a common denominator between employees. I am grateful that Drs. Dana Williams and Kendra R. Parker saw fit to include me in this necessary publication. I want to give a special thank you to Dr. Shanna Benjamin for her adroit assistance in helping me make this rage eloquent (pace Brittney Cooper). 1 The reference to Plessy v. Ferguson is very much intended. The separate but equal doctrine still exists as part of the de facto segregation for the disabled. 142 CLA JOURNAL Theri Pickens Though the conversations about my disability and my tenure-track life were supposedtobeseparate—thatis,mydiscussionswithadministratorsaboutcontract terms that were negotiable and our dialogues about disability accommodations that I was legally entitled to—they happened with the same parties during the same meetings. Simultaneously negotiating my contract perks and outlining disability needs risked conflating the two and negating the urgency of the latter. In other words, adding my needs for disability requests to the list of terms I was already negotiating could have been viewed as asking too much or understood as interchangeable with other requests. For example, could administrators read my desire for more conference funding as an exploitative move that was all about being able to travel more on Bates’ dime?2 The dean could have asked whether an increase in base salary meant that I could personally underwrite costs associated with creating accessible housing. Ultimately, in a town where most housing near the campus is owned by the college and none of it is accessible, the school had to create the parameters for me to be able to join the faculty and work at Bates. Plainly put, I cannot work where I cannot live.3 Further, these requests for access were not...