Jay Timothy Dolmage

Historically, higher education have encountered difficulties with the community of those with disabilities. Whether from eugenics that tries to cultivate superior offspring or from an ableism that makes the most of a person’s potential skills, universities have not always been the most hospitable to this group of people. Even today, after the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), K-12 American education has many helps for those with unique needs, but those needs are often neglected – or worse, stigmatized – in universities. In this book, Jay Timothy Dolmage seeks to address that the needs of that community by analyzing how higher education is falling short.

I am personally affected by a disability and administratively work at an academic medical center. My wife has taught special education for over a decade. My only sister has an intellectual disability. Despite five years of work, I was unable to complete a doctorate because of my disability. Therefore, I’m very sympathetic to this issue.

However, Dolmage spends almost all of the book compiling complaints about how short the academy is falling when trying to meet the needs of those with disabilities. I find four parts of this argument particularly troublesome.

First, much of his critique relies on identifying historical traces of eugenics. No doubt, some of this sad history is still with us, but eugenics has been repudiated by just about every reputable intellectual institution since the Nazi crimes in the mid-twentieth century. I need newer information than arguing that its ghost remains.

Second, he spends a whole chapter on how disabilities in higher education are portrayed in movies. Art certainly provides a healthy mirror to learn about our true nature, but I would prefer some rigorous science to back this up with hard data.

Third, the ADA is treated through a wholly negative lens, as mere window-dressing that doesn’t address the real problem. Perhaps, this is so in higher education – I plead ignorance there. However, in American society, I remember seeing a real difference in the way my sister was able to pursue life after 1990. My wife has also observed dramatic impacts on her students’ lives through the ADA. From an academic researcher, I expect a significantly more nuanced analysis.

Finally, the entire book compiles complaints about universities’ shortcomings, but provides almost no insights on solutions, which are limited to 2-3 pages. Correctly diagnosing a problem indeed provides the first step of a solution, but as a reader, I hoped to learn more about potential solutions from this book. Thus, I suggest that it needs to be reorganized with more details on what can be done practically.

I find this topic deeply interesting, but again, I hope to focus on present-day solutions based on serious reflection. This book contains a lot of rhetoric pointing towards a real problem, but it won’t convince many in decision-making positions to change their mind and practice. It won’t help us all reform ourselves so as to do better. I suggest a follow-up book might engage with promising next steps, not limited to a few linked articles in an epilogue.… (altro)

The core thesis: “physical inaccessibility is always linked—not just metaphorically—to mental, intellectual, social, and other forms of inaccessibility.” The steep steps up to the library of iconic college campuses are both very real barriers and powerful metaphors. In particular, “so-called invisible disabilities are particularly fraught in an educational setting in which students with disabilities are already routinely and systematically constructed as faking it, jumping a queue, or asking for an advantage. The stigma of disability is something that drifts all over—it can be used to insinuate inferiority, revoke privilege, and step society very freely. But the legal rights that come with disability do not drift very easily at all. Ableism drifts. Therefore, so must accommodations and access.”

He makes interesting points about the link between academia as a place where eugenics was promoted and legitimated and academia as a place for “positive” eugenics, that is, a place where the “right” kinds of people could be brought together to mate and learn eugenic ideals.

As a result, accommodations are temporary, retrofitted, because the model is “not to empower students to achieve with disability, but to achieve around disability or against it, or in spite of it.

The disablism built into that overarching desire for able-bodiedness and able-mindedness comes from the belief that disability should not and cannot be something that is positively claimed and lived-within.” No lasting changes are required.

What is to be done? He recommends constant anonymous feedback opportunities; this seems not likely to work well to me but I have worked on content moderation. As for Universal Design, he suggests understanding it as an inevitable failure in capitalist society, likely to be diverted towards flexibility only that serves the powerful and heightens surveillance. Given the distance from true universal design, administrative apparatus for accommodation can be dangerous even if it’s using language of universal design, which might just mean disinvesting in everyone or telling teachers (probably untenured) to do it themselves.… (altro)