The Trump administration’s ongoing attempt to eliminate DEI initiatives recently found its way to our backyard here at KJZZ. A few weeks ago, the Maricopa Community College District, which holds our license, announced a series of new policy changes to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive orders.
Kate Mohler teaches English at Mesa Community College. In addition to her teaching work, Mohler, until recently, served as the president of Ability Maricopa, an affinity group for college employees to talk about living with disabilities.
Mohler joined The Show to talk about the impact of the policy changes on her experience with the group— and we want to stress that she’s speaking here from her own perspective, not as a representative of the district. Maricopa County Community College District Chancellor Steven Gonzales was invited to speak about DEI changes at the district. He declined.
Full conversation
KATE MOHLER: Ability Maricopa provided a lot of social activities for employees. We liked to get together and simply talk about our experiences, our diagnoses. We shared a lot of resources, we taught each other about different approaches to our diagnoses. We made friends and it gave me the opportunity to serve others, which I really appreciated.
SAM DINGMAN: Right, I mean, if I'm hearing you right, these were rooms and spaces where you knew you were speaking to a group of people who were going to have a shared reference point for a lot of things that come up when you're dealing with a disability, particularly in the workplace, I would guess.
MOHLER: Yes, and a lot of us had never had the opportunity to communicate and hang around other folks like us, other like-minded people who had disabilities, some of us were struggling, some of us were thriving, and we learned from one another.
DINGMAN: Can you give me an example? Obviously you don't have to identify anybody, but of the range of what disability meant in those rooms.
MOHLER: We had members with an array of disabilities, your physical disabilities, blindness or hearing impaired, but recently we've been learning about neurodivergency. And a lot of us were surprised to find out later in life that we had neurodivergences such as autism or bipolar disorder or ADHD.
These days parents take their children to doctors and they get diagnosed with certain disabilities, but I have encountered quite a number of people who, for instance, have discovered that they're autistic when they get their child diagnosed.
DINGMAN: Oh so that if I'm hearing you right, is the kind of unique experience that is only just starting to become talked about more that you might be able to share about at an Ability Maricopa meeting.
MOHLER: That's right. We learned so much from one another. We learned from sharing our experiences with one another. We learned to be kind to one another and tolerant and encouraging. We learned to give people what they need.
DINGMAN: From your experience being in one of these conversations. Do any particular moments come to mind where somebody shared something that changed your perspective that you then took back to work with you?
MOHLER: Something interesting that happened to me is that as the president of Ability Maricopa, I got the opportunity to hang out with all different kinds of people and I made friends with a couple people who were autistic and I was also reading this book “NeuroTribes”.
So at the same time I was learning about autism, I was making friends with autism and suddenly it became apparent to me that I too was autistic. So I actually went to a provider and went through the testing and found out that I'm autistic. And that has been very helpful in understanding my life up to this point. It explains a lot.
DINGMAN: Does it help you in your work? I would imagine it must help you in your work.
MOHLER: It absolutely helps me in my work because now I can ask for an accommodation. An ADA accommodation to help me with forms and processes. I get overwhelmed and frustrated with bad directions, so I tend to be on a mission all the time to make sure people have good directions because good directions make us produce better stuff.
DINGMAN: Well, and as a professor, I imagine you're giving instructions a lot to your students.
MOHLER: I have been an instructor since 1990 and my experience in Ability Maricopa definitely helped me understand and identify with my students more. Students are so much more willing these days to step up and just say, “I have autism, I have ADHD,” to come right out and ask for help, and Ability Maricopa was all about empowering people to ask for help and serve one another.
DINGMAN: So listeners will probably have noticed we're talking about Ability Maricopa in the past tense. Tell us why we're talking about it in the past tense.
MOHLER: Sure. What happened is that the federal government conveyed that if we didn't stop DEI programs, then we have the threat of having our federal funding removed.
DINGMAN: And federal funding is very important to an institution like the Maricopa Community College District.
MOHLER: Right, because our students need financial aid, so we need federal funding.
DINGMAN: What went through your mind when you found out that the implications of these DEI related executive orders were going to mean that Ability Maricopa would be dissolved?
MOHLER: I can't speak as a representative of Maricopa County Community College District. I can only speak as a private citizen who happens to work in the district, and I do happen to be that past president of Ability Maricopa. And I was very sad because that was our community and our way of sticking together. We had a lot of solidarity in that group and we can't come together at work anymore.
DINGMAN: Well, I'm glad you brought that up because I can imagine some people hearing about something like this and saying, “well, it doesn't mean that groups like this, like the folks who are in a group like this, can't still get together. It just means that it can't be an official affinity group of the institution.”
So again, just from your own perspective, what was important about the fact that Ability Maricopa was formerly affiliated with the community college district?
MOHLER: Personally speaking, I have been teaching online only since 2016 when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, so the pandemic came along and I had already been online only for 4 years and I had grown used to being alone.
And when the district started offering all kinds of online offerings, I got excited because I finally had people to interact with during work time. I had friends. I had colleagues again and some of us continued to live pretty isolated lives because that's what disability does sometimes.
So we had really appreciated the opportunity to have a voice, and have our activities and be able to collaborate with students. There are a great deal of people who deserve a chance, who don't get that chance on their own sometimes.
