DREAM Weekly Email: January 17-23, 2021

​DREAM Weekly Email, Disability and Higher Education in the News: January 17-23, 2021
 
From DREAM: Disability Rights, Education, Activism, and Mentoring
Sponsored by the National Center for College Students with Disabilities and
the Association on Higher Education And Disability (AHEAD)
This week’s newsletter and archived newsletters are available at www.DREAMCollegeDisability.org
 
 
Top Five News Items This Week (see attached Word document for full newsletter with links):

• The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report saying federal TRIO programs must ensure campuses provide reliable data for their TRIO programs and target populations served, including the number of students with disabilities and veterans; TRIO does not currently have any way to verify data, even though there are incentives to provide inaccurate information.
• Learn more about Inaugural poet and recent Harvard grad Amanda Gorman, whose preparation includes practicing repeatedly because of her speech impediment; she says her disability has “made me the performer that I am and the storyteller that I strive to be.”
• The pandemic has highlighted inequities in the treatment of staff and faculty, including their benefits.
• In part one of a two-part series, The Chronicle of Higher Education is exploring mental health issues for students and faculty members of color. 
• The new fictional novel Admission by Julie Buxbaum explores last year’s college admissions scandal from the perspective of a student caught in the aftermath of fake athletic scholarships, SAT cheating, and false diagnoses of learning disabilities.

 
General News:

• A new Disability Culture Leadership initiative features videos of Chicago-based Deaf and disabled artists who have been in residence at UIC and information about disability arts and culture in Chicago.
• Disability advocates in Georgia plan to make funding for inclusive higher education one of their priorities in 2021.
• The first of its kind in Canada, a new transdisciplinary program at Brock University will combine forensic psychology and criminal justice, and was co-developed with professor Voula Marinos, whose work includes disability studies.
• The Editorial Boards of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade have issued a call for more sign language courses and acceptance of American Sign Language as a foreign language, to increase the number of professional interpreters.
• College Consensus has published a list of the “50 Best Disability-Friendly Colleges” for “special need students”; the #1 university on the list is the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

 
BIPOC and Diversity News:

• Gabriela Rivera Martínez from UMD College Park is addressing Latino language barriers and inequities in treatment of diabetes, after needing Latino role models in college. 
• Caltech is removing the names of six eugenicists from campus buildings and honors, at the request of Black scientists and engineers and alumni; US eugenicists influenced disability-related sterilization and extermination policies in the US and in Nazi Germany.
• Texas universities are using peer groups and actively recruiting BIPOC counseling students to address mental health challenges for students of color during the pandemic.
• International students have sued Western Iowa Tech Community College for promising scholarships and an education, and then forcing them to work in menial jobs under threat of deportation if they quit or became ill from COVID.
• University of Kentucky Professor Frances B. Henderson offered tips for BIPOC faculty teaching this spring, including advice to accommodate students with disabilities and a reminder that self-care and recharging can be a political act.
• Learn about the education of Rabbi Yehoshua Soudakoff, the fourth Deaf rabbi in the U.S., who created the Jewish Deaf Foundation.

 
COVID-19 News:

• In the latest survey of college students, 79% said that as the pandemic continues, they are concerned about their mental health, and only 68% said they would get the COVID vaccine if required by their college.
• President Biden has ordered Education and HHS to develop better guidance for colleges about “how and when to open” during the pandemic.
• Is the GatorSafe app at the University of Florida a great way to report course concerns, or a way for students to “tattle” on professors who try to teach in-person or hybrid courses online during the pandemic?
• Alan Rosiene, a professor at Florida Institute of Technology, professor Chia-Kuang (Frank) Tsung at Boston College, and Professor Mark Richter of the University of Kansas have died of COVID-19.
• A professor at Collin College received a disciplinary warning after sharing a tweet about the death of a professor from COVID; she says the warning punishes protected speech.

 
Sports and Athletics:

• Deaf senior Aaron Jones has signed to play football at the University of Pennsylvania.
• Abby Dunn has signed to play wheelchair basketball at the University of Arizona.

 
International News

• Disability activists in India are opposing the government’s plan to set up a university solely focused on disability studies and rehabilitation sciences, calling it segregation that “takes the disability sector backwards.”

 
Student Stories

• Twins Antonio and Armand Berry are both blind with other physical disabilities, and they have helped each other achieve academically and contribute to their communities.
• Bryanna Shaw says online courses let her return to Florida Atlantic University, and she is worried about courses moving offline again.

 
Faculty and Staff Stories:

• Jim LaPierre shares how his own experiences with mental illness and trauma have affected his teaching and how he reaches out to future colleagues who are also struggling.
• Law professor Jason Kilborn is on administrative leave and under investigation by a threat assessment team at the University of Illinois at Chicago after “flippantly” saying that certain moves by the administration would probably make him “homicidal.”
• A new poem by English and disability studies instructor Brian Trapp, is about his relationship with his twin brother who has CP and intellectual disabilities.
• Timothy Koets has pleaded guilty and sentenced to prison for child abuse and the drowning death of his autistic teenage son; Koets is a former professor at Grand Rapids Community College.

 
 
 
 
For more information about DREAM, send an email to DREAM@ahead.org.  This newsletter is available in other formats upon request.  DREAM and the NCCSD are funded through a grant to AHEAD from the US Dept. of Education (P116D150005).
 
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By the way, please don't presume DREAM, AHEAD, the NCCSD, or the U.S. Department of Education agree with everything we send out - we're just passing along the information so you can form your own opinions.  Thanks.
 
DREAM and the NCCSD acknowledge, with respect, the Waccamaw Siouan Tribe -- the Indigenous people on whose ancestral lands DREAM and the NCCSD are based.  We hope our work honors them.