Readers and writers blog

I was reading an article about ‘legacies’ — you know, affirmative action for rich white kids who get into elite colleges because of their family’s influence — and it caught my attention because I also happen to read for an elite college.

No, not read in the British sense of studying a subject at university, but read as in tape-recording textbooks for students with disabilities.

Now, the idea of legacies irritates me — in fact, it pisses me off for several reasons I will discuss later — but I’m not prepared to say that the students I read for, even though they may come from rich alumni families, are particularly advantaged.

One of the books I recorded a while back was an astronomy text. Besides reading the words in the text, I also had to describe the charts, photographs and illustrations, and the book was full of them. Imagine trying to describe an illustration showing the relative sizes of planets, stars, galaxies and various nebulae — or how magnetic fields and stellar winds interact.

It wasn’t easy, especially when I wondered how the student was going to understand any of this.

Because she was blind. From birth, I think.

Jesus.

The college, which is very well known, will remain unnamed. I don’t live in the same town — the texts and recordings are exchanged by mail — and there are a lot of elite colleges here in the Northeast.

I went to one of those Ivy League-type schools, but I was no legacy. My parents were white but poor, and my legacy from them was that I knew how to work, which I did, serving meals every day to fellow students who didn’t have to work. And I studied. I had to. Unlike most of my classmates who were prepared in academia at places like Andover and Exeter, I came from a public school where most graduates didn’t go on to college.

I was lucky to go to that college, and I never forgot it. But I wondered how many of my advantaged classmates realized how lucky they were to be born into the right families. Well, at least none of them wandered off to Texas, became a fundamentalist and then decided to make war on all the fundamentalists who didn’t agree with him. (So now you know I didn’t go to Yale.)

What got me thinking about legacies was an article on the website Diverse that said more advantaged white kids get special treatment in admissions to elite schools than the combined number of blacks and other racial and ethnic groups who are admitted under affirmative action.

I came across a similar article on the website Outside the Beltway in which a commenter said some well-off families arrange for even more advantages for their children by getting them declared ‘learning disabled.’ That gets them extra time on exams and extra help like the recordings I provide.

My recording work, which started about 10 years ago, is sporadic. When I started, I was otherwise gainfully employed and did the reading for free. Now that I’m retired and on a tight budget, I take the small hourly fee the college offers.

Like I said, it’s off and on, and I never meet the students. In some cases, I’m told what the disability is so I can adjust my reading. For example, if the disability is dyslexia, the student follows the text while listening to the tape. In those cases, I read faster than usual because sight reading is faster than oral reading. In other cases, other visual or learning disabilities are involved.

In fact, some of these students may be legacy kids who are faking their disabilities. In most cases, however, considering the quality of the college, I doubt it. But maybe I’m being naive.

My current assignment is reading a textbook on statistics — you know, the mean, median, histograms, deviations and all that stuff. I’ve been told to read the charts, graphs and formulas with their Greek letters and mathematical symbols, although I haven’t been told what the student’s disability is.

I can’t think about it being a legacy kid faking a disability. Because what if it’s another blind girl?

– Sid Leavitt