Margaret Soltan and Jim Crow

I need to begin this by saying that Dr. Margaret Soltan of George Washington University is probably a brilliant teacher and a lovely woman. A perusal of her page on RateMyProfessor and her circle of friends suggest both. I also think that she is a fairly strong and effective writer.

But I stopped reading her blog and her column long ago, and I would never take a class with her, despite the fact that we share many similar passions in the literature of the English language. I consider her a person who actively discriminates against people based on immutable characteristics of their humanity, a person who divides the world into first and second class citizens based on their similarity to herself. And I find that repugnant.

Dr. Soltan is hardly the only member of a university faculty I place in this category, but by making herself a spokesperson for her position she has effectively become a George Wallace standing in the doorway.

This is not an attack. It is an explanation. And I bring it up now because of a blog conversation inspired by Dr. Soltan at Easily Distracted. The blog at Easily Distracted starts with a typical Soltan hit-and-run against technology in the classroom. In this case quoting another prof who was incensed because a student in his class used a mobile to look up a word the prof had used in a lecture (yeah, really). Now, I'm historian and ethnographer enough to fully understand why a conservative Protestant theologian would object to any variation in the carefully linked structures of Calvinist Religion, Capitalism, and Gutenberg Technology. That's a received faith in authority and the unquestioned role of immutable text. And I understand that Dr. Soltan also teaches at a "private" university (though it is a "public university" by definition of Section 504 in terms of discrimination against students with disabilities because it receives - substantial - federal funds) and students have choices both within and without GWU...

But I'm not speaking of the legal complexities here, I'm speaking of morality...

I came to the Easily Distracted conversation because Carl Dyke at Dead Voles brought me in by referencing a blog post of mine on Technology and Equity in the conversation.

Now, 18 months or so ago I challenged Dr. Soltan on this. I told her how allowing technology into the classroom as universal design made people with "disabilities" far more equal. How it eliminated the humiliation of unwanted and inappropriate disclosure (all said in detail in my post Humiliation and the Modern Professor). And how her anti-technology stance bordered on illegal re: the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504. She responded that, "of course," she would offer accommodation to "documented" students.

Sew on that yellow Star of David

That is not an acceptable response. When we adopt Dr. Soltan's attitude we make it very hard for a lot of students. Students are forced to choose between disclosure and using the tools they need, and I can tell you, from much evidence both 'scholarly' and personal, that many, many students will choose to avoid the tools which come with disclosure. And that many of those students fail.

So, here's the impact of Dr. Soltan's opposition to the general use of technology in her classroom: (1) The further students are from being 'just like her' in abilities, learning styles, and learning preferences, the less likely they are to succeed in her class, because she requires that only her own technological tools be used. (2) Students with "disabilities" or significant learning differences are forced in to perhaps unwanted disclosure by her rules, which may have important consequences for their futures. (3) All students will be prevented from learning how their preferred toolbelt intersects with the world of English literature. Bad for all, disastrous for a specific class of students. Just as racial segregation was at the University of Alabama.

And I am done with this - Dr. Soltan might be horrified if, in order to use 'the facilities' at a meeting, everyone had to get up and declare their gender and sexual preference. She'd possibly be offended if, in order to enter a restaurant, she was forced to declare her medical record. Perhaps she'd be bothered if we did not let her drive to campus without publicly declaring that she was too unfit to walk. In all these cases, we assume that people in society can make personal and tool choices without needing to announce personal information or beg permission from authorities.

But Dr. Soltan is willing to do the equivalent to her students - not only that - she's willing to encourage others to do the same - in other words, she is willing to stand in the schoolhouse door and call the TV camera in to watch her block access.

That's shameful.

- Ira Socol

A blog commenter asked why it was wtong to make all these issues public: I replied -

"What I don’t want is anyone forced into unwanted disclosure in this society, especially in the US, where disclosure of disability can limit job opportunities and even access to health care. So, it is not important to me whether you take notes on a laptop because you have dexterity issues or problems forming letters, or issues with attention. I don’t need to know if you have digital books because you are dyslexic or have MS and can’t carry physical books, or even if you just prefer those.

"We can talk preferences and diversity, absolutely. But I do not insist that students proclaim their disabilities, their sexual preferences, their gender, their racial make up, or even their birth socio-economic status. That information is welcomed and greeted without judgment when offered, but I do not teach - or live - in a world so perfect that I am sure no harm will come from these revelations.

"Listen. I’m a doc student in a “Top Ten” School of Education’s Special Ed program (not a Prof -sorry), and there are still situations where I would rather appear insolent than disabled. So if asked why there is an earbud stretching from my laptop to my ear I might say, “I’m listening to music instead of you,” rather than, “the computer is reading to me.” Because I know that with certain university faculty, the former is sadly preferable to the latter."

Humiliation and the Modern Professor

In my fourth try at collecting an undergraduate degree I finally found real help. Struggling once again I signed up to be part of a multi-university national study of ADHD American college students. One of the first things they did was to have a "beeper-person" follow me to classes for a week, recording whether I was paying attention or not in 20 second intervals.

This was quite an amazing thing to live through. In one class the guy sitting next to me whispered, "Hey, that chick over there is staring at you." I told him what she was doing. "Wait," he said, "I've got it. Grab your crotch every 20 seconds. See what kind of report that gets you."

The next week they talked to me, showed me all these graphs, talked about when I took medication, and then said, "You really ought to take notes in class. It might help you stay engaged." "Notes," I said, "sure, why not." I had, literally, never taken a classroom note in my life, or at least not any which contained words. I had great notebooks from art classes and architecture classes, but that's a little different.

Still, I had seen plenty of people taking notes. I could do that. I went to the bookstore and bought a notebook and a pen.

Another week goes by and they ask, "Did you take notes?" "I did," I told them. "What did you do with your notes?" they asked. "Do?" I said. "You said to take notes, so I took them." I passed the notebook over to the profs running this study. What they saw was what my writing looks like when I'm hurried, or stressed, or, ok, what it looks like anytime that I'm not copying text from something else. Letters randomly strewn on the page, often backwards or upside down, sometimes on top of one another, sometimes going left to right, and sometimes going right to left. "Can you read this?" they asked. "Hell no," I said.

There's a sequence that is developing here, and it is a side story but an important one. Most university support staff tell students with attention, reading, and writing issues that they'll, "Get them what they need." But most students with these issues have no idea of what they need. They either know nothing, or sometimes worse - they know only what secondary school specialists have told them, which, unfortunately, is often useless.

"Hold on," one of the profs said, and went out, coming back a few minutes later with another member of the Psychology department faculty. And now I met the woman I call "the best special education teacher I have ever had." And we spent much of the rest of the semester together. Later on she would say, "You know computers, and there are computer programs that read to blind people, I'll bet there's one that will read to you." Which led me to Arkenstone and WYNN and into a whole career. But first she said, "You work in Academic Computing, right?" I said that I did. I was a self-described "tech monkey" stringing network cable. "See if you can find an old laptop that you can use to take notes. Notes are useless unless you can read them."

Then she paused and said, "Find yourself a notetaking buddy in every class, and compare every week, because you have no idea of what notetaking means, do you?" I admitted that I didn't. It is not something often taught. One more way schools expect you to know something that they've never explained.

And thus I became the "first kid in the class" with a laptop computer. And this was a crazy thing. "Could you please sit in the back?" one professor asked, "I think that will distract the other students." Another was deeply bothered by the sound of my typing. Still another by the computer's fan. Others were threatened by the idea that I'd hand in written work via a floppy disk. This seemed to them to enable cheating. In every class I had to explain myself to the professor, to other students, to everyone. Two semesters into the experiment I stopped going to some of the classes because I hated the attitudes - not the best academic policy, but one does grow tired of walking around all day with a giant "DISABLED" sign stapled on. Still, I stuck it out. It took years but I got the damn degree.

When I went back to graduate school something wonderful had happened. I remember walking into my first class and realizing that everyone had a laptop. Every single student. Now, suddenly, I was just one member of the class. Yes, I was more likely to have ear buds close by, though I was surely not the only one. But if someone noticed that I had one bud in at various times (listening to text) I could now easily claim insolence ("I'm listening to iTunes") instead of disability - which is really a nice choice to have.

So, here's why I'm telling this story. There are lots of professors out there determined to go back to the old days. Lots of professors determined that those with disabilities or other differences will always be clearly labelled and separated. Oh, of course they will never say that. And they are really not evil people. I think that they are just clueless, and inflexible, and uninterested in the needs of diverse students. I think that they have other priorities more important to them than expanding opportunities. They will say otherwise, and they will usually "mean otherwise," though the impact does not change. They will say that they want to block out distractions. They will say students need better manners. They will say that "technology has no place" in their classrooms (defining "technology" as anything created since they were born). They will say, "You can do without this for this hour, it won't kill you."

I need not point out too many examples of this. You'll see these arguments every week on Inside Higher Ed and in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and in newspapers and magazines, and on faculty blogs. This morning I read one more at Dr. Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, and I decided that I had to say something clear in reply.

Because, they will say, "You can do without this for this hour, it won't kill you." And I need to say, "Yes it will. It will kill me academically. Either it will humiliate me to the point where I will be less of a student, or it will humiliate me to a point where I will not bring my essential tools to class, or it will humiliate me enough that I will simply leave your school. And I am not alone. I am not alone at all."

The issue here is that laptops in the classroom represent the first real chance at Universal Design for Learning - the first real chance to allow every student to choose the media format most appropriate for their own needs - the first real chance for students who are different to be accommodated without labels, and I'll be damned if I'm willing to give that up for the vanity of a few faculty who cannot figure out how to teach with the greatest information and communication tool humans have ever developed.

There are too many in education who long for those "old days." And perhaps we should have a few universities just for them - they can cut their own quills, make their own ink and paper, set their own type by hand. I don't care. I'll let them chop their own firewood if it makes them feel a bit more like medieval scholars. But it is vital to remember that those "old days" sucked for most students. American schools - by their own measures - fail two thirds of their students (that is, those students fail to become "proficient" where that is expected). The college drop out rate is extraordinarily high among even those who try it. And even those who succeed usually report disinterest and disengagement.

In other words, the world these educators want to return to is a world that was really only good for them, and people just like them. And I'm sorry, that doesn't sound like a good thing to want to preserve.

- Ira Socol

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