Personal Reflective Essay on the Oratory Academic Tax

I am not fond or comfortable with vulnerability, yet I tell my students that working in student affairs or student success often involves being uncomfortable. While I am unsure I can be a model because I believe college professors to be fallible, I am attempting to maybe at least be a guide. I have just published my most open and transparency autoethnographic scholarship ever as a a scholarly personal narrative drawn from the framework provided by Nash (2019). I described how my identity experiences from a mixed-heritage Latinx and Italian immigrant family and (dis)ability impacted my development. This was complicated by my own identity diffusion and my struggles with (dis)ability too. As a child, and currently, I navigated speech disfluency as a well as a colorblindness. I further share my identity experiences that were formed by these changes in ability. I highlight how I have paid an oratory academic tax to participate in formal education in which I have been subjected to exclusion, invisibility, and bullying and how my fraternity experience was my space of refuge and safety as an undergraduate. These themes are are explored in a new essay entitled “Not Quite (dis)Abled: Influences on My Research on Fraternity and Sorority Experiences” in the Association of Fraternity/Sorority Advisors (AFA) publication Perspectives in the February 2021 volume. Here is the link.