by Eric Garcia
It is for this reason that many open autistics who work in academia have attempted to make it more accessible to students. In 2015, John Elder Robison, who is the cochair of the neurodiversity working group at the College of William and Mary and himself a high school dropout, urged autistic people working in academia to “come out” as autistic to combat the misperceptions about autism.
“Everyone knows how autism, ADHD, dyslexia and other neurodiverse conditions disable us as children. What we need to balance that are successful adults who attribute their achievements in part to neurodiversity,” Robison wrote in a blog post.
Robison noted that whether autistic people in academia were the “least disabled in our community,” hardworking, or just the luckiest in our group, they should be serving as examples for parents of autistic people and young autistic college students. I tend to agree with some of that; autistic people aren’t any less disabled just because they are in academia, and often, the professor’s lectern or the academic adviser’s desk can hide a lot of the adversity that comes from ableism in academia. And frequently, as I have noted in this chapter, powers beyond our control—whether that is God, luck, karma, or something else not the focus of this book—plays a large role in autistic success in academia. We do need autistic people in academia to show what autistic people can do when given the right tools. Furthermore, autistic people, including those who require more services, being open in academia show that many autistic people whose disabilities affect every aspect of their lives can also summit incredible heights.
“That’s the best antidote to talk like ‘He’s autistic; he’ll never go to college,’” Robison wrote. “While it’s true that profound disability will leave some of us requiring substantial supports and residential care even as adults, most of us can grow up to live independently and we have great contributions to make.”
Just as there needs to be autistic faculty and leadership, there must be neurotypical leadership in academia who prioritize recruiting autistic students. This was the case with Dave Caudel. After graduating high school, Caudel, who did not know he was autistic at the time, joined the army and then held a series of jobs in civilian life before going to college. But when he struggled to advance to graduate school because of poor admissions test scores, Caudel was recruited into the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master’s-to-PhD Bridge Program, which helps underrepresented students get into graduate programs in STEM fields. It was through that experience that Caudel met Keivan Stassun, who founded the bridge program and who has a son on the spectrum.
Eventually, Caudel was approached to lead a program to help autistic people who were having trouble finding employment. Caudel hadn’t planned on or prepared for the offer, but he was tempted. “It’s something that could make a real difference in people’s lives, so of course I had to say ‘yes.’ This is my tribe. It’s weird because I spent most of my life never having that experience,” he told me. Stassun and Caudel now lead Vanderbilt’s Frist Center for Autism and Innovation, which bills itself as working to promote neurodiverse talent.
Despite initially not thinking he was the right person for the job, Caudel said that he feels a deep sense of obligation to autistic people, particularly ones who faced challenges like he did, such as poverty. Many of his colleagues who have loved ones who are autistic are at an advantage, since they can afford to go to private schools and get special tutors and accommodations. “If we only take care of those wealthy kids who have autism, we’re leaving a lot of autism on the table,” he said.
Caudel benefited from having a neurotypical ally in that astronomy professor who wanted to help autistic students and who gave him a platform to lead, which is a good example of how to construct an academic environment where autistic people can excel and take control of their education. It’s a model in which autistic people are partners instead of merely patients or recipients.
Caudel said he is adamant about making sure that autistic people have a say in the construction of programs, and he reminds his boss that these projects would have more impact if the people working on them and who were paid were autistic themselves. “It would be awesome to say, ‘This was built for autistic individuals, by autistic individuals,’” he said. “Not to mention, they’re bringing their own brilliance and their own viewpoints.”
Initially, Caudel and the center were primarily focused on autistic adults outside Vanderbilt. But he told me that over time, more students approached him and others asking for help around various aspects of college life, like how to speak to an academic adviser or what to do once they graduated. Caudel and his team have worked to change perceptions about autism. He noted one instance in which a counselor told a student he didn’t look autistic, so Caudel met with the counselor to help build better understanding.
In response to the students’ requests, he helped start the Vanderbilt Autism and Neurodiversity Alliance (VANA), which was open to everyone from students, faculty, and staff to connect as neurodivergent people.
Caudel said he is always conscious of how he can work to add diversity to Vanderbilt’s autistic community. “The thing that keeps me up late at night is the fear of which parts of the spectrum am I not paying attention to,” he said. “They almost all need help, and every time we hire someone with a slightly different demographic, or slightly different part of the spectrum, it has added value.”
One of these hires was Claire Barnett, a graduate of Vanderbilt who wrote about her experiences on campus as an autistic student at the university.
“There are two sides to Vanderbilt’s treatment of neurodiversity—cultural and institutional. For the movement to create change at Vanderbilt, it must be addressed from both angles,” she wrote for her campus newspaper. In addition, like me, Barnett is a former White House intern; she interned in both the photo office and in Vice President Mike Pence’s office during the Trump administration. During the second internship, Barnett reached out to me as a fellow autistic White House intern for advice, and I was taken aback by her intelligence and her blunt nature. Today, Barnett serves as communications director at the Frist Center. But Caudel is quick to note she is good at her job for many reasons, not just because she is autistic. “I remember there were a couple of times when we would meet with some people, and she would tell people, ‘I got hired because I’m autistic,’ and I said, ‘Wait, stop, this is a misconception,’” Caudel said. “[She is] a brilliant communicator. On that strength alone, [she is] perfect for this job.”
The community Caudel has built at Vanderbilt makes me think about my final months at UNC, which were some of the most rewarding and the most brutal in my life. By moving to a state where I had never lived and working at the DTH and befriending my colleagues there, I found a new home that allowed my world to grow to include so many lovely people. In my final months on campus, I would pass by the quad and be reminded of the days I would ask students questions for stories. On weekends, I would walk past the Dean Smith Center, the stadium named for the revered basketball coach who coached Michael Jordan, and be reminded of going to see the UNC-Duke game with my friends.
I was not oblivious to UNC’s flaws. Like most snot-nosed budding journalists, I saw myself as whacking away at the systemic inequalities that kept people out of UNC; my friends and I would regularly rail against the ubiquitous tributes to the Confederacy and segregationists on campus. My love for UNC wasn’t unlike my deep patriotism—as a journalist, I’ve criticized my country’s shortcomings out of a desire to see it be what I was taught it should be.
Leaving UNC definitely hurt. Cammie, who had been the managing editor at the Daily Tar Heel, asked me to sit next to her at Kenan Stadium during commencement. That Mother’s Day in May 2014, I nearly overslept but got up just in time to shower and put on my cap and gown. My mom, Bob, my dad, and Stephanie rushed to Kenan from Raleigh-Durham International Airport. Steph’s graduation from Loyola Marymount University had been the day before mine, so they’d taken a red-eye flight from California to Chapel Hill and arrived in
the sweltering heat just as the music started.
I felt the unknown future breathing down my neck, though more realistically, that was probably just the sweat from having to wear a cap and gown in the Carolina humidity. Still, at the time, I had no job lined up and was dreading returning home. I feared if I couldn’t make money on my own, all my efforts to graduate would have been for naught. I looked over at my family in the audience, thankful they were there but also scared I would have to go back and lose control of my own future.
But for a brief moment, as the ceremony ended, those anxieties faded as I heard the Clef Hangers, UNC’s male a cappella group, sing “Carolina in My Mind.” James Taylor wrote the classic about his youth in Chapel Hill (where his father was a professor). For those two minutes, I put my arm around Cammie’s shoulder and hummed along as they sang, “And ain’t it just like a friend of mine to hit me from behind? Yes, I’m gone to Carolina in my mind,” as if UNC and all the people I met there and at Chaffey were hitting me from behind to push me into the real world. Heartbreakingly, I was also leaving the first place I could genuinely call home.
3
“That Ain’t Workin’”
* * *
Work
John Marble didn’t intend to have a career as an advocate for autistic people in the workforce; in fact, he didn’t even intend to admit he was autistic. He spent much of his career working in politics, starting as a White House intern for Vice President Al Gore. Afterward, he did advance work for Gore and then left college to work for Gore when he ran for president. He ultimately served as a presidential appointee to the Office of Personnel Management. It was during that period when Marble was spinning out of control at work, at one point thinking he would go deaf because every sound became white noise (he later learned this was a difficulty with sensory processing). Marble said he saw his autism diagnosis approaching.
“I started seeing the picture of autism, and I fought it, and I resisted it, and I was like, ‘No, no, no, that’s not me, but I need to figure out what this is,’” he told me. But when he visited a friend in California for a weekend at a cabin, he had a meltdown. “I didn’t know what a meltdown was then, and I just remember crying in his arms.” By then he could see signs everywhere; he knew he had autism.
But Marble had trouble getting diagnosed because many doctors still do not diagnose adults and some will not accept insurance, which meant Marble had to save up for it. Finally, he spoke to a friend who also worked in the Obama administration that he was beginning the process but still needed some accommodations at work. Marble’s friend suggested he meet with Ari Ne’eman, then an appointee to the National Council on Disability. When the two met for coffee at a Starbucks near Ne’eman’s office in the Foggy Bottom area of Washington, Ne’eman noticed Marble was having trouble and suggested that they talk in his office instead, which was quieter. Marble realizes now that this was a setup by Ne’eman so that Marble could notice how his sensory processing differed in loud and quiet settings and help him accept he was in fact autistic.
As Marble waited to receive his official diagnosis, Ne’eman suggested Marble visit a meeting of autistic adults at a coffee shop that happened after-hours. It was there that he met autistic people like himself: lawyers, people in the military, and other professionals. Shortly thereafter, Marble wound up going to an all-autistic retreat in a cabin in the woods, where he met autistic people who could not speak.
“I remember crying the first time I was speaking with a nonverbal autistic who was communicating slowly through an iPad,” he told me. “And I realized we experience the same world in much the same way, and yet the world is looking at us radically differently and I was looking at us radically differently.”
Marble eventually left the Obama administration to work on Hillary Clinton’s campaign, after which he moved to the Bay Area, but he had trouble finding work. A friend suggested he meet with a tech executive who was advising a program called Autism Advantage, which was run by an organization called Expandability (now called Neurodiversity Pathways) and focused on getting autistic people into integrated employment (a fancy way of saying autistic people working with nonautistic people).
Marble finally found his professional stride at Neurodiversity Pathways. He also worked with its Workplace Readiness Program, a six-week session that creates individual service plans, which, like individualized education plans (IEPs) for disabled students, make an “actionable plan” to help neurodivergent people across the spectrum find and set personal and professional goals. The program also helps them prepare for the interview and application process to ultimately find work. Afterward, they are offered postemployment job coaching and support. The program also conducts simulated work environments and Marble frequently took students around to companies so they could hear from professionals with the same skills they had.
Marble and I have many things in common: We’re both former White House interns and autistic men, and we are both outliers. We have been fortunate enough to have had positive mentors and supportive employers. None of these things are guaranteed for the community at large. There are two dominant myths surrounding autistic people in the workforce. First, autistic people are often the victims of what former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson called the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” meaning they are expected to be unable to work or only able to work jobs that pay subminimum wage. The second myth is the inverse of the first: people view autistic people as being hypercompetent in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, as if we should all be coders in Silicon Valley.
In 2012, as professionals were debating whether to change the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-5 for autism disorders, NBC’s medical editor Nancy Snyderman, who was a physician, said that while some people believed that kids who had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome could be mainstreamed and didn’t need as much help, others said that those were “exactly the kind of kids you should invest in because those children are the Silicon Valley of tomorrow.”
But this binary abandons and actively harms many autistic people who live between these poles. Autistic people excel in a myriad of jobs. No one should presume to know what autistic people can do; what should be presumed is that autistic people belong in whichever professions they choose. That being said, autistic people’s value and worth should not be tied to whether they are employable. It doesn’t matter if an autistic person holds a high-paying job or receives government assistance; autistic people should be viewed with the same dignity that all people deserve.
My Career
In my family, politics were always discussed. However, I found my way into a career in political reporting thanks to my first love, music. My dad was a drummer growing up and his favorite bands were groups like Rush, the Cars, Led Zeppelin, Ozzy Osbourne, Van Halen (my dad and I disagree on whether David Lee Roth or Sammy Hagar was the better singer), the Scorpions, and AC/DC. What’s more, my stepdad played bass and went to Woodstock but left early because he thought it was a dump. When my mom started dating him, he introduced me to Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, the Animals, Jeff Beck, and the Rascals. My dad’s and stepdad’s love of music made me want to pick up a guitar, and I got one for my tenth birthday on the condition I take lessons.
My first teacher was an austere Russian who berated me for not practicing or playing right, so my mom hooked me up with a new one. JohnPaul Trotter was eighteen years old at the time and I remember him wearing khaki shorts and band T-shirts. He introduced me to the musicians whose names were on those shirts, people like Jimi Hendrix, Santana, Eric Clapton, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, as well as their influences, like Buddy Guy, Albert King, and John Lee Hooker. He even took me to my first concert: the Who at the Hollywood Bowl. That night, we somehow got backstage and wound up chilling with Slash, the long-haired and often shirtless and top-hatted (though not that time) guitarist from Guns N’ Roses.
It was JohnPaul who noticed that I liked the stories behind music almost as much as I
liked the music itself, so he suggested I get into journalism. I loved learning that Stevie Wonder wrote my favorite Jeff Beck song, “’Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers,” as an olive branch to Beck after Stevie kept “Superstition” for himself even though it was Jeff Beck’s futzing around on the drums that inspired the song. I liked reading which postwar blues guitar players influenced Eric Clapton (who loved Albert King and Robert Johnson) and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin (who liked Willie Dixon). Thanks to JohnPaul, I applied to work for my high-school newspaper. They needed someone to write up small pieces about the 2008 presidential race, and I caught the political bug then and there. Covering the primary race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama seemed like the most exhilarating job there could be.
Hence, when I came to Washington three years later to intern at the White House, the place was a natural fit. I loved that it was a city that thrived on politics and that I was praised for the fact that I lived and breathed my work. Being a White House intern mostly involves menial tasks, and I didn’t do much of them in the White House even, let alone in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. I worked at a remote building, sending out standard responses to letters addressed to Michelle Obama, her daughters, and their dog Bo. (I had a good laugh on my first day when I saw a stack of letters to be sent out to Eagle Scouts, not unlike the one I received from the White House when I achieved the rank.)