Achieving Greater Acceptance in Academia

Based on an interview with Ian Shipsey 

I grew up in a working class district on a notorious council estate (housing project) in London's East End. I was hearing at that time. My high school had 180 students per year. Only two of us went to university. My parents had left school at 16. As far as I am aware none of my fellow students had parents who had attended university either. I went to the local university; Queen Mary, in London to study physics. I then took a PhD in particle physics at Edinburgh where Peter Higgs was one of my teachers. Shortly after arriving at CERN, the main particle physics lab in Europe, I fell in love with a wonderful Italian physics student who was heading to the US for a PhD so we began a transatlantic relationship until I had completed my PhD then I went to America to join Daniela. Daniela and I married and have one child. Shortly after getting married, while Daniela was still a student and I was a postdoc and both of us were working on the CLEO scientific collaboration at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) a particle accelerator at Cornell University, I contracted acute myelogenous leukemia and was treated by a remarkable team of doctors and nurses at the Cornell University Medical School in NYC for more than one year. An industrial strength dose of chemotherapy beat the cancer but left me without an immune system and a medically necessary dose of broad spectrum antibiotics protected me until my own immune system had returned. A side effect off the antibiotics was irreparable damage to the hair cells in both cochleae resulting in severe sensorineural hearing loss.

Although still a postdoc I had already accepted a tenure track assistant professorship before becoming ill. I was very fortunate, had the timing been different and I had become ill before job season had commenced I would not have had that position and would have been regarded as unemployable by many. I accepted the job about a week before any symptoms appeared. The postdoc was at Syracuse University and the faculty position at Purdue University. After recovering enough to take up my new position about a year later, I then moved to Purdue which is about 120 miles (180 km) south of Chicago in Indiana and Daniela came too as a postdoc.

The unconscious assumption of able-bodied people is that deaf people are less able to teach or conduct research. Being underestimated is OK up to a point. In my field in the US it is typical to take one or two postdocs, each of 3 to 4 years duration, before becoming an assistant professor. I had only been a postdoc for 2.5 years when I was offered the job at Purdue (and jobs at other schools) so I was considered very promising. Purdue was a big physics department with about 60 faculty and about 57 of them had never met me as hearing person. They thought life had been dealt a very tough hand, they were kind and empathetic but they found it hard to consider me any longer as promising.

It was assumed I could not teach and nobody was quite sure what to do so I was left to my own devices. I did some research partly funded by the start-up given to me by Purdue and then wrote three proposals for young scientists, two of which were successful and resulted in very significant funding. One was the National Science Foundation National Young Investigator Award which that year only two people in the US were given in my area. Having won the awards, it is customary to be considered for early promotion to tenure to pre-empt other universities from poaching but in my case I had no teaching record so I could not be promoted. To fix that I was given an opportunity to teach which I had no experience of doing. The teaching experience was wonderful. Being deaf served to make me a better teacher because I strived harder to be especially clear so that the number of questions students had tended to build and extend the material I was explaining rather than asking for further explanation of what I had already "explained". At the end of the semester I received the physics professor of the year award. The award is given by the physics students at Purdue including those I had taught. It means to this day a great deal to have received it. The award helped to establish my ability as a teacher and I was promoted to tenure. Meanwhile Daniela became an Assistant Professor and our daughter Francesca was born.

When I moved to Purdue I continued to work at Cornell for most of my research. A small network of friends on CLEO, all able-bodied, took it in turns to help me by taking notes at meeting. They said that in front of their eyes they saw a transformation in my ability to contribute, often decisively, to discussions. Eventually this led to I and several others developing some new ideas, and to me being elected the scientific leader of the collaboration and the award of very substantial funds to conduct a new program in particle physics at Cornell. It was while leader of CLEO that I explored cochlear implants and received one.

Prior to my cochlear implant, communication with students especially in large classes was difficult. To solve the problem I asked students to write questions down on paper and pass them up to the front of the class. Students in large-enrollment physics courses are often very shy about standing up and asking questions; writing the question made it anonymous and hence easier for students to ask questions. The method was subsequently tried out by some hearing faculty to good effect. I sometimes communicated with my own doctoral students through bone conduction; the student and I both leaned our heads against a wall and the student talked into the wall and I could sometimes comprehend what was being said though the vibrations combined with lip reading. In any situation where I was not a focus (such as in the audience at a conference) understanding what was happening was very difficult so I avoided conferences and did not in general network. Conversations were difficult. Hearing people feel awkward speaking to deaf people first because nobody enjoys saying something and not being understood and second very few hearing people have had any experience of talking to a completely deaf person.

There were two turning points in my ability to communicate. The first was that physicists in general are very interested in the research of other physicists. In the CLEO collaboration at Cornell, everyone knew me as a hearing person who became deaf. This meant that the deaf stereotype was not applied to me so strongly by that group and there were several faculty at Cornell who proactively began to help me with communication, offering to take notes for me. In addition, I began to request stenographers at Purdue and Cornell.

At conferences today, I simply sit in the front row and if I cannot understand I ask people to speak louder and slower and to repeat what they have said but I would not have had the confidence to do that in the early days.

I did not find it easy to gain access to stenographers as they are few and expensive. In principle the deaf students and I had the right to a stenographer, but there were more of us than there were stenographers. I used stenographers occasionally until 2003 when I had the cochlear implant. It’s quite likely that there are many parts of the world where students who are unable to hear do not have sufficient access to stenographers today.

In my field, some of my postdocs and students will typically be based at CERN. Communication remotely was very difficult before I received the implant. It was mostly text based (shared electronic logbooks) and email. Now we communicate via Skype and video conferencing. On experiments in particle physics everybody takes it in turn to run shifts operating the experiment. After I lost my hearing, but before I received a cochlea implant running shifts was hard for me, as although we have a lot of visual information when we run shifts, there are also purely audio cues such as alarms that it would not be possible for me to hear. However, colleagues happily and kindly installed visual equivalents (warnings on a computer screen when the alarm sounds). This enabled me to feel comfortable taking the shifts as with the accommodations that had been made I could now do the job as well as when I could hear and as well as other physicists. Much of the work I do is in my office, but when in the laboratory the work is visual and I have many wonderful students and postdocs and engineers and technicians working with me and helping me, almost all are able-bodied.

I find it difficult to understand amplified voices. This is because amplification distorts voice as well as making it louder. For hearing people, the noticeable effect is the volume increase whereas the distortion is usually unnoticeable or at least not distracting. For many with a cochlear implant the distortion dominates any gain in volume. This is because cochlear implantees have less sense elements than those with natural hearing so our auditory pattern recognition is inferior. If the auditorium is small I request people do not use a microphone to ask questions but if the auditorium is large I ask the audience to write down their questions.

Before I had my hearing restored I was elected three times to be the leader of the CLEO Collaboration, a group of 21 universities and about 180 scientists at Cornell. After I received a cochlear implant, I became Head of the LHC Physics Center at FNAL and was elected Chair of the Collaboration Board of CMS (one of the two experiments at CERN that discovered the Higgs). I was hired at Oxford to become Head of the sub-department of Particle Physics in 2013 many years after I became deaf and had a cochlear implant.

I need no special resources now except the cochlear implant. I do ask people to look at me when they are speaking to me, and when people mutter I ask them to speak clearly. I do not participate in the sign language community because nobody I knew professionally or outside work could sign. I have met with signers though to talk about my experiences with the aid of SL interpreters. Since receiving the implant, I have found that I am much more likely to be placed on committees and more frequently asked to give talks and more generally given opportunities as it has become easier to communicate. Throughout my career in the US and UK my colleagues have always been very supportive.

It is a real phenomenon that many scientists feel conflicted about acting publicly as a scientist with a disability because there is a risk they might become less known for their science and more known for their activism. The same thing happens when an academic engages significantly in outreach to the public or to school kids. One starts to become known for outreach and academic colleagues will question if you are a devoted academic. My strategy to deal with this is as follows: if I am invited to an event to give a talk because I am deaf, I concentrate mostly on my work, what I have accomplished and how rather than concentrating on the disability. The result is that people see an example of a practicing scientist passionate about their work who happens to be deaf. With this strategy I am not trying to trivialize the disability, I am trying to show that its effects can be overcome.

One of my doctoral students had a very severe speech impediment. He was an outstanding student with outstanding grades, yet he had difficulty to find a professor to supervise his thesis. He was very bright and we did great work together. Looking back now it seems to me a person with a disability is sometimes more sensitive to the difficulties faced by others with disabilities, and in some cases this makes them better prepared and more confident they can effectively help and supervise the student. That is certainly the reason I took the student. I did not see the disability as anything other than surmountable.

I generally disclose my deafness. I am proud of it. O Course, I would prefer to have natural hearing but I am inspired by the incredible technology of a cochlear implants that, when married to a human brain, can enable an implantee to understand much of the auditory world. To achieve greater acceptance of disabled people in academia, we need more role models. We need access to the right types of support so that people with a disability are not disadvantaged by that disability to the extent possible.

 About the Author

Ian Shipsey is the Henry Moseley Centennial Professor of Experimental Physics and Head of the Sub-Department of Particle Physics at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford.

Wanted: Disabled Faculty Members

Written by Jay Dolmage and Stephanie Kerschbaum 

We have kindly been given permission to re-post this article from:

Advice Hiring Faculty Members Essay

When one of us -- Stephanie -- was on the job market for the first time more than 10 years ago, she agonized over whether and how to mention her disability (she is deaf) in her job materials. She knew from past experience that by not saying anything, she ran the risk of creating potential misunderstandings during interviews.

When she managed to secure more than a dozen interviews at the Modern Language Association conference, where English departments perform much of the preliminary interviewing for hires, she set to work. In addition to helping arrange for interpreters in a city where she and most of the hiring departments meeting with her had few contacts, she opened every interview by taking time to explain who the interpreter was and how committee members should interact. In addition, before MLA, she spent time ensuring that every single department had contacted the interpreter, arranged payment and logistics, and so on.

While all that work might sound almost impossible to candidates who don’t have to jump through such hoops, the fact is that, for many disabled scholars, the sorts of choices they face around disclosure and negotiating job market accommodations are deeply complex, fraught and, above all, risky. And for none of them is the process easy, uniform or predictable.

Stories like Stephanie’s -- and dilemmas around disclosing a disability or requesting accommodations while on the job market -- are endemic. Almost every academic we know with a disability has a story about accommodations gone wrong, an inaccessible interview situation or a thoughtless ableist comment.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Many organizations such as the Modern Language Association and the National Council of Teachers of English have general guidelines about disability and the job market. The MLA’s guidelines, for instance, ask departments to make sure that interviews are held in accessible locations and to take steps to create a welcoming environment during the interview. We offer a few additional suggestions to help search committees and hiring units to avoid disability discrimination in the hiring process.

The Job Ad and Interview Invitation

The ad and interview are the first steps and, as a search committee or hiring unit, you should:

• Examine the boilerplate text. Recently, the boilerplate text included in job ads has been changing in sometimes subtly yet often overtly ableist ways to add physical and sensory requirements that rarely have anything to do with the job itself. If you are writing a job ad, read David Perry’s work on this discriminatory language.
• Clearly identify whom applicants should contact to request accommodations. You should also ensure that there is a confidential process by which those accommodations can be negotiated. Search chairs and committees need to inform candidates of this process in advance in the interview letter, and the contact person for negotiating accommodations should not be the chair of the search committee or a faculty member in the department. Instead, a clear channel should be identified through which a candidate can request accommodations that may be needed. A useful model here is the way disability services offices inform faculty of accommodations that need to be made in their classroom without disclosing a student’s disability. The system in place should not require a candidate to open a conversation with a search committee member or department chair that reveals personal health information or specifics about their disability.

The Responsibilities of the Hiring Committee

The hiring committee or unit should be well-versed in issues surrounding interviewing and hiring candidates with disabilities. You should:

• Discuss how to preclude any disability discrimination in determining finalists for positions. That might mean, among other things, anticipating how candidates might move, react or perform differently at different stages of the interview process. You should also consider the significance accorded to certain kinds of performance. For example, a person who learns names quickly may make a good first impression, but that hardly is a prerequisite for success in academic work. These and other tacit social tests should not be part of the hiring discussion.
• Consider how different interview processes might disadvantage certain candidates. Committees should work to minimize any disadvantages interviewees who have different communication, social and interpersonal styles might experience. In such discussions, the focus should be on how hiring units, search committees and job candidates might generally make the hiring process not just more accessible but also more effective. For example, if first-stage interviews have only been conducted via Skype or by telephone as accommodations, committees might consider offering all interviewees in the pool a choice as to their preferred modality. That move avoids signaling one choice as the “typical” interview setting and the other as a “special” accommodation.
• Educate yourselves on how disability disclosure may be (illegally) compelled in conversation. Don’t ask after health conditions or comment on people’s bodies. Don’t assume either that anybody whose physical appearance does not reveal a disability is able-bodied. When possible, give candidates options and information that may make it possible for them to address issues that arise. (For example, candidates with dietary needs may be able to determine if a restaurant’s menu will suit their needs.) Engage in conversations with applicants that make clear when there is flexibility should they have any accommodation requests.
• Be aware of common forms of disability microaggressions. People often act amazed by what a disabled person can do, assume that a disabled person needs help doing other things, ask overly personal questions, compare the candidate’s disability to other forms of disability perceived to be “good” or “bad” and so on. In the context of a job interview, such comments and questions can be especially harmful and difficult to handle.

Setting Up the Interview

• It’s important that disabled candidates -- in fact, all candidates -- receive as much information as possible about the interview location and situation. To that end, you should:
• Communicate as much information as possible about interview settings and procedures. That information might include how the interview will proceed and in what formats. Offer detailed information about buildings and locations where meetings may happen. Are all the buildings wheelchair accessible? Are there accessible restrooms in the building? Will interviewees be asked to move across large campus spaces to get from one meeting to another? When disabled academics don’t have full information about the spaces in which they may be giving a job talk, teaching a class or conducting a meeting, they may not know whether accommodations are, in fact, needed, or how to effectively craft or adapt their delivery and presentation.
• Offer applicants choices. Where possible, we encourage committees to offer interviewees some choices. What technologies and resources will they have available or need to use for their job talk or teaching demonstration? What kind of food will be offered? When might they have opportunities for physical and mental breaks? Will there be an office available to them or a room where they will have privacy? Can they choose when something like a public talk will take place in the day? Can they choose where to sit if they are being interviewed or met by an entire department? These may seem like insignificant choices, but they could allow candidates to meet medical and other needs throughout the process.

Finally, we want to emphasize that the culture of academe itself contributes to disability discrimination. The current neoliberal climate for higher education puts pressure on all academics to be ever more flexible and adaptable. In such an environment, many highly qualified academics may fear that requesting any kind of accommodation might be interpreted as inability to perform, leading them to take their chances without the accommodations that have enabled their success. To ensure that faculty members can request and receive the accommodations they need, committees should openly indicate that access and accommodation are on their radar and proactively signal awareness of disability as important to diversity.

We hope our suggestions will encourage departmentwide and institutional conversations that can build awareness and promote accessible practices while avoiding disability discrimination. Our recommendations can be read, applied, circulated and expanded upon in a very practical way as we head into hiring season. Is your department hiring? Send this article to the search chair and start the conversation now.

About the Author

Jay Dolmage is associate professor of English at the University of Waterloo, and Stephanie L. Kerschbaum is associate professor of English at the University of Delaware. They are both committed to addressing forms of institutional ableism and challenging disability discrimination through their research and scholarly activism.