Returns

Glenn wrote:

Returns

The quarter started on March 25, and I have been really busy with classes. It’s usually the way things are at the beginning of the quarter.

I have my TypeWell accommodations back in each of my four classes. So everything is going well in that regard. There have been some minor adjustments as a new transcriber was moved to another class. That didn’t really affect things for me in the class very much.

I was looking in the employment ads for internship possibilities and came across an ad for TypeWell transcribers that had been placed March 6. The ad said that the DSS office is looking for five student transcribers. I wondered if that meant that the school would find some way to replace the more experienced transcribers to save money. It seemed a little odd to me because there are three students graduating in June 2008, and that is roughly half of the students who use TypeWell services here. The question I had was what made the school think that there would be a demand requiring five additional transcribers?. Right now it seems that everybody’s services are covered. I asked an administrator I have been working with, and she said that she was not able to determine a timeline for the ad. It may have been placed by mistake. Another reason that the ad seems odd is because the school had been advertising Glenna’s position as coordinator for deaf/hard of hearing services, but the ad was pulled later. Speculation on that action—the administration decided that things were too unstable at this time to be advertising for a coordinator.

Sometime toward the end of last quarter, I got word that Charlotte Tullos had agreed to put together a task force to make recommendations on the future of deaf/hard of hearing services. I was asked to make some recommendations for the members of the task force, which I did. I believe that I recommended myself because (among other reasons) I have the most experience using TypeWell and I have also been a student here the longest. Some people thought I would be a shoe-in for being on this task force.

I found out earlier this week that I was not going to be on the task force. My first reaction as that I was excluded because I have filed a complaint against Rob Harden and the university with the Office of Equal Opportunity. I felt that I needed to find out for sure instead of speculating on the reason, so I contacted Leslie Webb, who has been appointed to chair the task force. She has been good about responding to me via email, and assured me that there was no “real” reason that I wasn’t selected. Apparently, I was third on the list and the two ahead of me accepted their invitations, which fulfilled what Charlotte wanted—two students.

After looking over the list some more and considering who would be on it more carefully, it seems fairly obvious that everyone on the list was carefully selected. All of the faculty and staff members on the task force have various qualifications to recommend them as members of the task force. Each of these people have various skills, education, training, experience, etc that would seem to indicate they would best represent the goals of the task force. They were not simply random faculty or staff members; their qualifications were carefully considered. So by choosing some lesser experienced students than me to be student representatives leads me to wonder what the true agenda is behind the choices made. In addition to not agreeing with the choices made for student representatives, I don’t full agree with some of the choices made for faculty and staff members. Some of the faculty and staff have a lot less experience in their fields than some people that I recommended to be on the task force. The only conclusion that I have been able to draw so far is that there are some politics involved in the selection process.

That being said, I think there were some really good choices made for task force membership. I don’t think that experience is always the best indicator of a person’s abilities to do something. There can be other considerations as well, which is where politics can come into the picture. It’s possible that I am viewed as not being “political” or whatever. I’ll probably never know the true reason.

Leslie has assured me that even though I am not an actual member of the task force, I can still give input on the proceedings. I will have access to the minutes of the meetings held and other material. I am not sure how this is going to happen yet. Leslie is still figuring that part out. I am certainly planning to give input on this. I have always been passionate about restoring our accommodations and I have too much invested in it to simply drop out and let things go on without giving my input.

I was able to arrange a last-minute meeting with Leslie on Friday afternoon. My intent was to have a quick meeting to do the usual introductions. I also wanted to get a feel for the kind of person she was. Email correspondence only goes so far in revealing personal qualities about an individual, and I needed to see for myself what kind of person would be chairing the task force. Leslie told me she had a master’s degree, so I figured it would be a safe assumption that she was intelligent. I had heard the same from Glenna—that Leslie was a bright person. Meeting her in person did a lot to support these statements, as I think that Leslie has a great deal of intelligence. But that was hardly the only impression that I came away with, as I found her to have a very refreshing perspective on things. By this, my impression is that she doesn’t seem to have an agenda--other than to carry out the charge of the task force. She doesn’t seem to be as political as much of the administration I have dealt with in the past. In email correspondences that took place before our first person-to-person meeting I asked her what her qualifications were to chair of the task force. That seemed like a reasonable question to ask, and she did give me the answer readily enough. In our meeting on Friday, she took the opportunity to try to show me that she wasn’t going to be political by telling me that she shared that email anonymously with a colleague. The response that Leslie got was something along the lines of “Leslie, what are you gonna do??” as if the question I asked was inappropriate. Leslie informed that she was not going to “do” anything like her colleague seemed to think she ought to do. Leslie thought that it was a good question to ask, and students should be asking these kinds of questions. That her colleague doesn’t agree with that is indicative of the attitudes held by some of the administration. “We’re administrators, you students should never ask us why we do our jobs the way we do.” This attitude is really quite defensive, and does very little to foster a trusting relationship between students and administrators. I would go as far as saying that this attitude probably has a lot to do with the why this situation came about in the first place.