the agile academic

Shannan Palma - Of Many Minds

• Rebecca Pope-Ruark • Season 5 • Episode 2

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Welcome to this special mini-season of the agile academic where my co-editor Lee Skallerup Bessette and I introduce our edited collection Of Many Minds: Mental Health and Neurodiversity Among Higher Education Faculty and Staff out now from Johns Hopkins University Press. In this episode, Lee and I speak with Shannan Palma about her experience being neurodivergent in higher education and contributing to the Of Many Minds project.

Rebecca Pope-Ruark (RPR): Welcome to the special mini season of the Agile Academic, where my co-editor Lee Skallerup Bessette and I introduce our edited collection of Many Minds Mental Health and neurodiversity among higher education faculty and staff out now from Johns Hopkins University Press. In this episode, Lee and I speak with Shannon Palma about her experience being neurodivergent in higher education and contributing to the of Many Minds Project. 

Welcome to the Agile Academic, a podcast for women in and around higher education. In each episode, we tackle topics from career vitality to burnout and everything in between. Join me as I chat with inspiring women about their experiences, pursuing purpose, making change, and driving culture in the academy and beyond. I'm your host, Dr. Rebecca Pope Ruark. 

Hi everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm excited to be back with my co-editor, Lee Skallerup Besette. Say hi, Lee. 

Lee Skallerup Bessette (LSB) Hi Lee. 

RPR: And we are here also with one of our many minds contributors, Shannon Palma. Hi Shannon, welcome to the show. 

Shannan Palma (SP): Hi, Rebecca. Hi Lee. Great to be here. 

RPR:We're so excited to have some contributors come on and talk a little bit about the book. Tell the listeners a little bit about yourself to get us started. 

SP: I haven't done a pseudo academic bio in a really long time, but I do have an academic PhD from Emory University in Women Gender and Sexuality Studies. And my work was when I did it on myth and I was really looking at general to specific processing, neural processing because I was really confused by other people. And so I decided to study them because I thought there were people out there who were not well and needed to be studied so that maybe we could help them with their disorder. And so then I found out I had the, which I'm still questioning a little bit, I think my original thesis stands and my work supported it, so I had a sense that I was neurodivergent, but anytime I asked anyone, they told me I wasn't and I was just smart. So I would go around and I'd be like, no, I asked, I'm not not autistic. My cousin is like, I'm not a DHD, my nieces are, I'm not any of these things I've asked. They told me I'm not diagnosable. And I asked over and over and over again, but I didn't become a faculty member because I knew I was not going to be able to do the faculty politics and all of that. That was going to be really, really hard for me, and I just didn't want to put myself through it. Then I did accidentally become a faculty member later in my higher ed career, and then that experience was ongoing at the beginning of COVID and during COVID it was really bad. And during COVID I escaped from that job, found another career path and diagnosed autistic and A DHD also co-edited a book that Leah is in with Katie Kerns and Karen Cardozo, which was Higher Education Careers Beyond the Professoriate. And ironically, while we were co-editing that book, we all left hiring. 

RPR: Oh, wow. 

SP: Yeah. But now I run a nonprofit, the Autistic Self-Reliance Support Network, and we serve autistic adults and specifically we work to flip the power dynamic and autism research and funding to prioritize autistic driven research and priorities. And then we also build capacity for neurodivergent light organizations. And then we also started tech company. We make assistive technology for neurodivergent people, and we have our first product came out at the beginning of this year decide, and it's an AI powered decision support application. So it's not designed to replace decision making or make decisions for you, but it is designed to clarify your reflection process so that you can trust what you know and kind of cut through the noise of decision paralysis and overload and sensory overload and all of the things. So yeah, now I'm A CEO. Things change. Nice. Yeah. 

RPR: Yeah. Nice. Awesome. That's great. We're on the show today. Yeah, and we'll be sure to share links in the show notes to the book she mentioned, as well as the app and the nonprofit as well. We want everyone to make sure that they see those as well. So what attracted you to the of Many Minds Project? 

SP: While I was working on Higher Ed Careers, the higher ed careers book with my co-editors, Katie Kerns, who is brilliant and amazing and so wise in ways of neurodivergence and support for faculty and staff and graduate students. She sent me the call for proposals and she was like, what do you think about this? We had been having all of these when you get a bunch of recovering academics in a space, co-editing a book, as I'm sure that you also experienced the Zoom chats when you're working, but you're also randomly sharing just tidbits from your life over the course of it. And so they had been there for all of my, leaving my faculty position and getting diagnosed and then shifting my career in a different direction. I really wanted, at that point I thought maybe I had begun to make sense of what had happened and understand it differently. So I thought it would be a good opportunity to write about it. 

LSB: Awesome. And we appreciate that. So what do you see as some of the big challenges facing higher education as a workforce when it comes to supporting those with mental illness or neurodiversity? And you talk about leaving academia and it being alluding to it being really difficult, perhaps putting it mildly. So what do you see as some of those big challenges? 

SP: One of the hardest parts for me was in terms of the structure of the organization. And this was something I saw both at the private research university that I worked at for or was a student at or taught at for 14 years, and then also at the small liberal arts college where as a faculty member. And that is the erasure of faculty as bodies, as body, brain students, however have been, it's so interesting. This whole industry has grown around supporting students neurodivergence or ability. Not to say that they're doing it well, but it's grown around it. And it's that dissonance between what's the real goal? Is the goal to have a inclusive community or an inclusive community or is the goal to power the financial engine of the university? And the goal is to power the financial engine of the university. 

And so the support is all in support of keeping paying students. It's not actually in support of student wellness. And because faculty are not, and staff are not paying, we are paid. That support does not exist for us. And what was fascinating in my situation was that it was kind of a perfect storm of my own undiagnosed neurodivergence coming out and needing more structure than the college could provide or would provide, and wanting people to acknowledge when they were saying something that was different from what they told me yesterday and wanting a just clear reporting structure, being honest when I was like, when someone's pounding their fists on the table, why don't you trust me? I don't trust you. You haven't been trustworthy to that kind of over honesty, which for me is a start to a conversation, not an end a conversation. It's like, well, I'll tell you I don't trust you. Let's talk about why that's the case and see how we rebuild trust as opposed to, I don't trust you. End of conversation, leave the room crying and my brain bumping up against other people's neuroses and mental illness and having no way to advocate.

I can't diagnose somebody else. I can know there's a problem, but I can't do anything to say this person is not well. And if I do, then I am trashing someone's personal. I'm trashing them as opposed to just a system of support that says, you know what? This person is better than the way that they're acting, or these two people are experiencing major conflict. Instead of the goal being to make them shut up about it, who do we make the goal to actually resolve it? And I kept asking for help. I went through all of the structures that were supposed to help me, my faculty mentor, my advisory committee, the dean, and every time I went to a resource for help, that resource was either removed, they reassigned my faculty mentor, or I was told not to talk to them anymore, or they came to me and they said, yeah, you should just leave. You're not going to get the support you want. Or in one case, I had someone tell me, well, administrators don't last forever if you just wait it out. Faculty are the ones who are forever and you can just wait out bad administrators. And I was like, that's not a solution. And also, my dad died when he was 58. I don't view my life as having unlimited time to waste, waiting out toxic colleagues. I want to live my best life now. So for me, it's that not what the goal of the university is. It's not knowledge, it's not communal support. 

There's a lot of, it's kind of like America. This is so, I probably shouldn't make this analogy, but talk a good talk. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Here's this really great ideal we have about knowledge and the life of the mind. Nobody better bring up their minds, their actual brains or bring those to the room. Everybody has to just stay. The mission is all that matters, and we're going to contradict all our values when it comes to how we pursue that mission. Does make sense? 

LSB: Yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, it is something that came up a lot in the various stories is the roadblocks that people met when they tried to get help, right? Tried to get accommodations, 

SP: The roadblocks for accommodation. I had another faculty member who had a physical disability who I would have lunch with, and she said that she had gotten accommodations, gotten a verbal agreement of accommodations from the dean and was told not to ask for it in writing. And my advice to her was, oh no, you need to ask for that in writing because as soon as that person leaves, anything can happen because what they're doing is they're making sure there's no paper trail. Yeah. That kind of thing. Big just, and it boggles my mind. Like I write, make a to-do list on my to-do list just so I can cross it off. I love documentation. 

RPR: So many tensions. There's just so many things at play. The take care of students, but not take care of faculty and staff. What is accommodated and what's not accommodated, who is welcome, who is not welcome. 

SP: That also goes to, they're not really taking care of students because I had a lot of trouble with a student for whatever reason I was, I was a big trigger for her. And she came after me really hard and they just kind of said, thank you for sharing your thoughts whenever she complained about me, but nobody said, this person's not okay. She needed help. And I was going to my supervisors and I was like, I can't help her. She hates my gut. And frankly at this point, I'm terrified to talk to her, but she needs help. She doesn't need to be continuously, but the goal is not to help. The goal is to keep students paying 

LSB: Or to limit liability 

SP: Or limit. That also came up, I had another student who had a mental break and thought we were in a relationship, and I reported it immediately and I was like, this person needs help. She's having this, we've only ever met on Zoom. I've been kind to this person and they are brilliant and probably nobody has been kind to them before and they need help. And they had a disciplinary meeting. And when I left, she was still contacting me. And I called them and I was, Hey. And they were like, you don't live here anymore. You're not here anymore. We don't have to take care of that. Call the police. No, that's not an answer. This is somebody that we've taken into our community who is really struggling and needs help and is worth helping calling the police. What? No, 

LSB: No. We haven't set up, and I'm thinking about the recent book that came up. We have not set up caring universities. 

SP: No. 

LSB: Right. We have not developed systems and structures of care. We've set up systems of discipline, of capitalism, of all different kinds of things, but caring is definitely not one of them. And I mean, it shows in the stories that you've been telling and then the stories that we tell that it is there is the say in the institution Can't love you back. But the institution also puts up barriers so that people cannot care for one another within the institution, which is really rough in that sense that the institution does not have to be set up that way. 

SP: And it was one of the reacting against that or pushing back against that was one of the fundamental tenets when my co-founder and I formed our business was we wanted it to not be that. And we both were educators. And so we immediately hired an HR firm externally. So if somebody had a problem with us, they had somebody else who they could complain to. And we had an office safe board, anyone got uncomfortable and with conversation, and we modeled the work structure on faculty hours basically like you work when you need to work, get your stuff done, take care of yourself. And we're very open. I take multiple naps a day. Everybody in the company knows that. And sometimes, and we encourage people to be like, okay, what are you doing after this meeting? I'm going to go take a nap or I'm going to walk my dog or go to a yoga class or something. Because everybody's trustworthy. They're getting their work done. But the only way we can make our organization live up to the values that we propose is to actually apply them to ourselves first. 

RPR: It sounds like quite an empowering transition out of higher education into these new spaces for you. 

SP: It was amazing. Yeah. I had done non-faculty work. I'd done staff positions primarily in higher ed. And then when I transitioned to faculty, I was good at my job. That was part of what really sucked. I was good at my job and I had fallen back in love with my research again, and I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it. And I left mid academic year in my third year, and it had been supposed to convert to tenure track and all of this stuff. And I was like, I don't care. I don't want to be here. I immediately took a job with a K through 12 computer science education nonprofit, took some of the needs and interests of girls, and that was for academy, and that was lovely. I ran, hon, I taught second graders how to code hack women games. And it was really, really good because I also got confirmation the, that I was good at my job, that I was a good leader and I was a good teacher and a good colleague, and that experience had been abnormal. And then it gave me this really powerful healing time where I wasn't in charge of anything. I mean, I kind of was, but second graders are pretty lowkey. They're middle schoolers. They accept it. If you're just like, you know what we're going to do today, not jobs. 

Everybody has to use hand motions to communicate. So it was very healing in that sense. And I was really close to burnout. And then going through the process of diagnosis and all of it was very, very helpful, but also quite traumatic. My assessor experienced transference and behaved very unprofessionally. And I was really at this point where I was just like, what is it about me that makes people completely inappropriate, consistently across every aspect of my life? Why are people behaving in ways that are, people don't do this. This is not a thing people do, is it? These aren't the people rules? And kind of coming through that and realizing that I don't react in real time, the way that people expect to tell them that their behavior's inappropriate. So many people base their perception of their own behavior, not on their own integrity, but on other people's reactions in the moment to what they're saying or doing. 

And so I don't react so people or I just smile and nod. So people would say things to me and I would smile and nod. And if I'm not processing any of it really until later, and then I would realize that over the course of the conversation, it had gone completely off the rails. It wasn't me, but it was me. I was not reacting in a way that made them think about what they said, and then their perception of the conversation would be completely different from mine because they wouldn't remember what they said. They'd remember how I reacted. 

And so when I said, you told me X, Y, Z, or You said this to me, this was very disturbing. They'd be like, I don't know what you're talking about. So it's just a lot of processing, a lot of processing, a lot of processing. And I really wanted to make it worth something. So that's when we decided to start our own nonprofit. And there were just so many people out there who were getting late diagnosed and did not have my background for understanding it. And I did because I had been studying this, what is this weird thing where people think there's a story and they think that story is true and they walk around acting like it's reality, but they don't pay any attention to what's actually happening, which was my work was on myth and fairytale and how people just scripted their lives and followed these scripts and stereotypes and did not connect with what was actually happening. 

And so I had done all of this research on memory and cognition and trauma and diversity and disability and neurodiversity and disability and all of these things. So when I realized where I fit in it, I was like, oh, okay. So I could actually apply my work still. I can make my research meaningful by taking all of the things I learned in higher ed and then keeping the structure of what makes a good argument or what is empirically validated research. But throwing out every social norm I could think of and really prioritizing care and having an agreement with, we have a structure for making decisions. But after the first year, we made our coworker a full partner. So one of the people we had hired made her a full partner so that her voice would be equal to ours. Not just talking about it, but putting into motion and saying, here's a third of the company. Your voice is important and you have earned this. We built this together, which is not something like nobody does that in the university all, I'm the first thought player on this paper. So it was a good chance to put my values into practice in a way that I had always felt frustrated by and I read. 

RPR: So let's talk a little bit about your essay in the book. Tell us a little bit about what the writing process was like when you were writing your essay. 

SP: It was actually like I read the prompt and I wrote the essay the same day. So I got the call and I was trying to think like, oh, I should write an abstract or whatever. And actually at the time I was writing like crazy when I was going through the diagnostic process, I wrote 30,000 words or more just processing, processing, processing my whole life, just figuring it out from this with the new information. And now it made sense. And the essay really, really flowed, which I had not expected that I thought it was going to be really difficult to write about. And there were pieces that I did not include. There were things that happened that I thought, I don't need to make anyone else responsible for this with me. I can talk about what I know was a problem, the ways that I contributed to it and the ways that it was misread without sharing some of the interpersonal dynamics that complicated everything. 

So I made decisions about trying to protect people's privacy. But I did that and I tried to stick to something that I thought was objectively true, not subjectively true. I have a lot of subjective truths about everything that happened, but objectively, I was asking too many questions That was the source of friction over and over and over again. And I was asking questions I was asking for, I was like, can we just agree on the same reality? So my speech was perceived as hyperbolic. It wasn't to me, I was trying to understand what reality was, but at the time I thought, that's everything I'm doing is perfectly reasonable and actually what I should be doing in my job, this is what my job is. I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. And going back through and reading and writing the essay helped me figure out where the tension points were. 

And then also to confirm, no, actually I was quite good at that job, which by the time I left I, I wasn't leaving my house. I gained 20 pounds. I stopped talking to friends. I wasn't sleeping at all. My anxiety got to the point where I had to see a doctor, which I probably should have done well before that. But it got to the point where even what I thought was normal for people, because I thought everybody just was worried all of the time, was to the point that I was becoming nonfunctional. So it was good to write it down. It was just very, very, and to let it go and to say, okay, there might be others who get, what can I learn from this? What are the things that would've made this better? You've got to take, everybody's a human, you got to treat all your people like humans. And when people set boundaries, you got to believe them. And you got to, they're not, don't immediately assume that a boundary is lack of cooperation. Sometimes what they're doing is they're telling you, this is how I can do my best. This is how I can give you what you want. I'm just trying to tell you how to get the best out of me. That's not being difficult. It's actually quite helpful. 

LSB: And I think higher education, going back to the questions of the structures is not caring. It also excels at making individuals feel like they're the problem and also sends the message to other individuals within the system, individuals that their problems. So again, that idea of boundaries, right? The way the system and the structures are set up is that you set a boundary, you've now become a problem. 

SP: When we were writing the intro to higher ed careers, I was thinking about this quite a bit, and we started talking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which I come back to a lot in different contexts, but academia inverts Maslow's higher hierarchy of need. And that is a problem throughout the university and throughout higher ed, because that, what is it, self-actualization or whatever that's seen as the baseline, the most important. Your body is just some other, you can get to that if once your mind is the most important thing, not your actual physical brain, not your needs or the ways that you want to support your mind or that your unique and brilliant mind functions. No, it's the specific kind of portrait of a professor or of knowledge as this concrete, attainable object that you stands above everything else. And so the process of going through academic training, it teaches you again and again to instead of when you're growing up, part of normal child development, normal quotation is that you learn first. 

It's just your giant id, but you also do whatever your parents say. You have no real ability to impose your will, and then you're just a giant no, and everything is about what you want. And then you learn to consider others. And then you have to learn not to care what they think and to be yourself anyway. So even just like high school, college, thinking about it, high school, middle school, high school, you're like, it's normal to just, or it's typical to care what other people think. And to be, hear more about your peers than your parents. And then college, you kind of find your group, you learn who you are, and you find people that fit you instead of trying to make yourself fit other people. And then grad school, you undo all of that. And it's that process of peer review that's embedded in every single facet of academic life is not, it's a, let's go back to high school in terms of social structures and interactions and that also, you can't be different if you're different. We don't want you to fit into the clique of what we have decided is important, and we're going to review you at every single stage, all the people around you to see if you're allowed to still be here. It doesn't matter how hard you work if we don't like you, so you have better make us like you. 

LSB: We've talked a lot about your experiences and the writing of the essays, but ultimately, what do you hope this book accomplishes with its readers? Not just your essay, but all of the essays in this collection together? 

SP: I really just hope it makes people think maybe other people's reactions aren't about me. Maybe everybody else is obsessed with themself as much as I'm obsessed with myo. And we could go through the world assuming that instead of that everything is about ourselves. Because I do think I've seen some really bad stuff happen in higher ed. I've seen a lot of really toxic stuff happen in higher ed, and that's not counting school shootings, and that's not counting the red zone where first year college students are so readily sexually assaulted. It's not counting all of the institutional things that are already, that are going higher. Ed needs to take a really long, hard look at itself. And I don't know if the current structure can really be salvaged, but people can change their community if they decide to. So I hope the book makes them think about that. 

RPR: Well, thank you so much for your time this afternoon, Shannon. It was great to talk to you, and we look forward to your essay making a real difference in the community. 

LSB: Yes. And we'll be sure to share all of the great resources that you have created the books. And again, thank you so much for agreeing to participate in this podcast episode. 

SP: Thank you for having me. 

RPR: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Agile Academic podcast for women in higher ed. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. To make sure you don't miss an episode, follow the show on Apple, Google, or Spotify podcasting apps and bookmark the show. You'll find each episode a transcript and show notes  at theagileacademic.buzzsprout.com. Take care and stay well.