LIFELONG INTERACTIONSPersons with disabilities and intergenerational universal usability

Disabled faculty and staff in a disabling society: Multiple identities in higher education. New York: Association on Higher Education and Disability, 2007. I recently received an email from a doctoral candidate , in a field unrelated to my own, seeking career advice about the process of finishing a disserta-tion and navigating the academic job market as a person with a disability. Such a request is not that unusual in my experience, primarily because there are so few successful academics with disabilities. I recently contributed a chapter to an edited book on the unique career challenges of being an academic with a disability [1], and several of the chapter authors started a running joke about whether there were any academics with a disability who did not contribute to the book. Further, as only about 15 percent of persons with disabilities are born with them, the majority of academics with disabilities tend to be people later in their careers. As a result, very few people with a disability go through the academic job market and tenure process. And many of those individuals, primarily for sake of survival in a career path based around perceptions of performance by one's peers, opt to downplay their disability to the greatest extent feasible and believable. As part of this strategy, many academics with disabilities avoid researching and writing about disability to avoid marginal-ization. And others are simply steered away from studying disability by their dissertation advisors. In contrast, I have made equality of access for persons with disabilities a key part of my research, and my advisor even encouraged me do my dis-sertation on the topic. I have also been very open about my own disability in my scholarship when it was relevant—for example, the introduction of one of my books gives an overview of some of my personal adventures with disability discrimination during my education [2]. The striking part of the email I received was not the request for advice, but how the author introduced himself. After mentioning his name, educational status, type of disability, and reasons for contacting me for guidance, this individual raised a hesitation—he was concerned that I might not be able to relate to his situation. His concern was not rooted in the fact that we have very different disabilities. Instead, he was concerned about the fact that he acquired his disability as an adult, whereas I was born with mine. …