What would you say if you had the attention of your university president for five minutes?
I was honored to receive the 2025-2027 Presidential Teaching Fellowship at the University of New Mexico. Granted by the Teaching Excellence Committee at the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Presidential Teaching Fellowship is among the highest recognitions for outstanding teaching at UNM.
As the Presidential Teaching Fellow, I am spearheading an initiative titled “Academic Pipelines for Lobos with Disabilities.” (The lobo is UNM’s mascot.) Part 1 of my initiative involves a series of conversations with faculty about disability and academia. If you want to read more about these conversations, check out my posts on LinkedIn.
So, in my five-minute acceptance speech, I called on university leadership to do better by Lobos with disabilities. Here’s an excerpt from my notes:
Here at UNM we are esp cognizant of the funds of knowledge that our faculty, students, and staff bring to these pursuits. As a HSI and maj-min public university, UNM values the range of backgrounds, cultures, languages, and traditions that enrich our classrooms and our campus. But not disability.
Too often physical impairments, neurodiversity, and mental illness are assumed to put limits on possibility. But disability is not the limiting factor; rather, it is the barriers to inquiry, understanding, and creating for are put in the way of those of us with bodies and minds that work differently.
And it’s those differences in body and mind that matter. Disability brings its own possibilities precisely because, like other identities, it too introduces funds of knowledge. So we, as an institution of learning and teaching, need to acknowledge, value, and foster these unique ways of being in the world – ways of being that spur innovative points of entry, fresh understandings, and novels solutions to both enduring and emergent questions.
Marissa Greenberg 