Last March, a terrible story made its way through my social media feeds. A woman with Down syndrome had been raped. Her rapist was convicted. Then, a judge vacated the conviction because the woman “didn’t act enough like a victim.” I kept waiting for someone in the mainstream press to write a more nuanced piece than “this is horrible,” because while it was indeed horrible, it’s also the kind of thing that happens in rape cases all the time. If we think it’s horrible in this case involving disability, then it should also be horrible in ALL cases.
So I wrote about that for CNN. It got tens of thousands of hits, thousands of shares, and positive letters sent to me by some really awesome people and organizations, pleased to see this denunciation of rape culture on CNN.
A few days later, a job ad showed up for an early modern English professor that said, “MUST PROVIDE EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE.” I blogged about it, it got a few thousand hits, so I wrote a more formal essay on it for the Chronicle of Higher Education. It stayed on their “most viewed” list for most of the week.
I pitched a regular column to the Chronicle and started talking to the folks over in Vitae about writing for them too. I wrote about 6 essays to prove to the CHE folks I could do it, and they all went into various queues (published over the next four months).
I wrote three more columns for CNN in May. And I was off.
Stats:
Chronicle of Higher Education Essays: 21
CNN Essays: 14
Al Jazeera America Essays: 4
Essays I put on HuffPo: 2
Vice: 1
Reproductive Health Reality Check: 1
Co-written for The Atlantic: 1
Inside Higher Ed (University of Venus): 1
Post that I shared with Good Men Project and then ended up on Business Insider (uncompensated): 1
Blog post I revised for BLOOM: 1
Total published pieces (counting Bloom and GMP): 47.
Here are a few of my favorite essays.
- The Learning-Centered University (Chronicle Vitae, 7/1/2014)
- An Academic “Working Dad” (Chronicle.com, 5/19/2014)
- Ferguson and the Cult of Compliance (Al Jazeera America, 8/15/2014)
- Psychiatric Disability & the Police: The search for reasonable accommodations (CNN.com, 8/26/14)
- Fighting Gender Norming One Backpack at a Time (Huffington Post, 8/26/14)
- Catholic Universities and Undocumented Students (Chronicle.com, 7/21/14)