Has anyone written about how disabled folks are most likely being completely excluded now from being able to be hired on as tenure track professors even in the slim to none chance that anyone lands one of those in the first place?
Think about it. A round two interview demands not only in person travel that likely requires an unmasked airport and planes, but also days of meals and visits around unmasked people pretending like a pandemic doesn’t exist. The social pressure is completely inaccessible.
If an institution doesn’t account for that, they are virtually elimating disabled academics from ever being hired again.
Well, that, or they’re demanding already at risk academics to further risk their lives by conforming and appealing to respectability politics that would most likely sicken, further disable, and kill us.
And this becomes infinitely more complicated when understood in the context that the vast majority of autists are not formally diagnosed because the Dx criteria has failed the most of us, the laundry list of other reasons a formal Dx is an inaccessible privilege, AND the very long list of commorbidities (that have only been found relatively recently [5-15 years-ish]) with autism that compromise one’s health in ways that likely make us more at risk and vulnerable to COVID repercussions.
Mind you autists with even a bachelors degree were found to have an 85% unemployment rate. So this is just a new present-COVID-19 addition to a long list of ways institutions have been designed to exclude us from the workforce.
And this isn’t an insignificant issue because there are many autists in academia. With the natural inclinations for research and teaching, it’s a rather common career path for many of us.
If you are on a search committee, do the right thing: create accessible options for your candidates to do interviews virtually. Otherwise you are reinforcing the elimination of high risk academics from being given a fair hiring opportunity.
Please, if you have the power to, lead the charge in this effort. Do it yourself.