I absolutely agree with Jim regarding the Disability Students' Office on
campuses. As all of you know, I was a university professor for over 40
years, starting in 1971. In addition to my experience as a professor, I was,
of course, a university student myself for many years. Like many of you, I
never, at any time, had anyone holding my hand, taking notes for me, taking
me from class to class, allowing me to take my exams without any time
limits, finding and setting up readers for me, etc. Like most of you, I was
on my own, responsible for my own arrangements with readers and professors,
and it was my responsibility to get the books, send them to Recordings for
the Blind, or get them recorded by someone else on my own. In contrast, for
the last several years, all of these kinds of things have been handled for
my blind and disabled students by the Disability Students' Office.
Consequently, those of us who learned how to take care of ourselves
graduated with our degrees fully expecting and prepared to find employment
on our own. My blind students that went through their degree program with
someone doing everything for them graduated fully expecting someone to find
a job for them and fully expecting their employer to adapt the job situation
to meet their every need. I always had the attitude that my blindness is my
problem, not society's or the government's, and it was my responsibility to
adapt to the world around me, and find my own accommodations to be able to
fit into an employment situation, not the employer's. Now, I know my words
here will really upset some people and rub some people the wrong way, but
all I can say is that I have never been without a job or a way of earning
money and taking care of my family. Throughout my teaching career, I always
had a teaching assistant paid for by the university, but then, that wasn't
any different than any of the other sighted professors. In fact, while I was
teaching at the University of Texas, some of my colleagues had two
assistance, one as their teaching assistant and the other as their research
assistant. Even my JFW speech program was paid for out of my own academic
research fund, which was money all of the faculty received as support for
their various research efforts, e.g. as I recall, we received a $300 award
for each top-tier journal article we got published, and we could spend our
academic research money any way we wanted as long as it was to support our
teaching and/or research. So, I used that money to pay for my JFW screen
reader program. I could have forced the university to pay for it out of its
discretionary funds, but I elected to not do that.
The bottom line is that those of us who learned to take care of ourselves,
do, and those who are taken care of by someone else, don't!
I strongly suspect this also applies to some of the challenges we face in
ham radio. However, having said that, I'll have to admit that as I've gotten
older, I don't do nearly as much entirely for myself as I used to, like
climbing trees, putting up antennas or climbing around on the roof, and I
haven't homebrewed anything in quite a long time. Hmmm, come to think about
it, none of my fully sighted ham friends who are my age do any of those
things any more either! <Smile>
Ron, K8HSY
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