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there is little to no attention being paid to giving full-time faculty the training to teach students who have a wide range of capacities when it comes to what counts for normal classroom discipline:  sitting still for an hour and taking notes, being in crowded rooms where they risk being bumped and touched, overcoming obsessive behavior to get to class or hand in a paper on time, working in small groups with other students, or being in large classes with crowds of strangers.  It is also happening in a context in which being full-time faculty is becoming anomalous, and the financial “flexibility” of running higher education on per-course labor makes it unlikely that the vast majority of faculty will be eligible, or open to making unpaid time available, for the training that would make their classrooms accessible to autistic students

People with autism, Gilman notes, also tend to have disordered sleep, affecting the capacity to function at high-stress times of the semester when we assume that most students are pulling all-nighters.  They have difficulty relating to someone they are intimate with (much less an impatient, overworked faculty member who wants all students to act like the adults they appear to be), what they are experiencing and what is wrong, which would make even the most generous office hours not useful. So when we are putting together arguments for hiring full-time faculty in the next round of budget cuts and declarations from foundations that tenure is holding us back, think about adding this one in.  The demands on faculty to be well-trained, knowledgeable, creative and flexible teachers are growing — not subsiding — and attention to this will make all the difference in keeping our classrooms truly inclusive

colleges and universities don't have the infrastructure to replicate what these students have relied upon in high school

diversity statements tend to be more useful to search committees when institutions provide a definition of diversity and explicit expectations for what should go into the statement.

reframing the prompt to focus more on fixing systemic discrimination in academe. Candidates would submit a reflection on the history of their discipline. That would necessarily include discussion of equity and diversity, he said. And it would make clear that departments are grappling with the question of what needs to be done to change their respective disciplines.

Plenty of scholars, like Flier, the former Harvard dean, would rather do away with the statements altogether. "The more the expectations become influenced by critical race theory and related concepts, and the more they are used to hold back or reject faculty who fail to echo the latest expectations, whatever they might be," Flier wrote in an email, "the greater the chance for damage to academic credibility, and the opportunity to erect politically tinged litmus tests."