DISABILITY AND ACADEMIA: NEW BOOKS
New books about academia and disability by Katie Rose Guest Pryal and Jay Dolmage extend the important project of Margaret Price’s Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. While many of Pryal’s brief essays consider faculty experiences of navigating academia with a disability, Dolmage assesses how “students with disabilities have been excluded, the ways the academy has accommodated them,” and how “disability, as an identity and an epistemology . . . will continue to push us to understand teaching and learning in new, broader, and more empowering ways” (Chapter One). Both Pryal and Dolmage identify higher education’s hostility to disability and point to ways that academic environments can be reformed.
In Life of the Mind Interrupted, Pryal, who taught as a graduate student and then as a contingent faculty member, considers how race, gender and faculty status affect various aspects of academic work life, such as the decision to disclose disability to colleagues. Organized under headings—“Disclosure Blues,” “Collegiality,” “Teaching” and “Beyond the Academy”—these short pieces, many of which were previously published in the Chronicle Vitae and Women in Higher Education, provide pithy writing and incisive observations that draw on her own experiences and those of the people she interviews, as well as on published sources about disability.
Pryal pays particular attention to invisible disabilities. She quotes a contingent faculty member who suggests that stigma about mental health concerns is pronounced, since, “‘in academia, one’s brain is supposed to be the most essential asset one has.’” Asking for help, either informally or in terms of accommodations, threatens a loss of privacy and the exposure of vulnerability. Pryal notes that she taught “at the university level of twelve years without ever considering seeking disability accommodations,” disclosing her disability only to her friends until she left academia and began to write publicly about how poorly mental disabilities are addressed in academia.
Some essays are more advice-driven, as in Pryal’s suggestions about how conferences and other academic spaces could be more inclusive, or how faculty members who are uncomfortable listening to personal disclosures can guide students to appropriate supports. In her more autobiographically-inflected writings, Pryal provides forthright (she rejects the problematic descriptor “brave” for personal writing about mental health) discussions of how depression and suicidal ideation are compounded by shame. She also makes a strong case for universal design principles, because “the accommodations model requires us to disclose our disabilities” and “shifts the burden to the person with disabilities” to demonstrate entitlement.
Dolmage’s Academic Ableism, which uses as its title the Twitter hashtag inaugurated by graduate student @zaranosaur, describes how “academia powerfully mandates able-bodiedness and able-mindedness.” Throughout this absorbing, provocative, and insightful book Dolmage uses metaphors such as “steep stairs” and “the retrofit” alongside discussions of “imaginary college students” to explore how higher education is rhetorically as well as spatially constructed. The analysis is elegant and the examples are carefully selected. Writing studies and disability studies academics will benefit, and anyone grappling with student accommodation needs—that is, anyone who is teaching—should consider Dolmage’s important critique of how the accommodations process is weakened by a range of factors, from the power imbalance between faculty members and students to the limited number of formal accommodations (such as extended exam time) typically allotted to meet documented needs. The discussion of Universal Design’s potential neoliberal co-optation is especially crucial, as Dolmage wonders whether “a gesture toward UD” might be “a way to say ‘we don’t need to invest in any more accommodations’” for individual students (Chapter Four)
In Dolmage’s discussion, faculty members are part of higher ed’s gate-keeping, reviewing (with skepticism) student request/demands for legally-mandated accommodations. But what of the accommodation needs of faculty members with disabilities? Dolmage notes that faculty are largely outside the scope of his analysis, but he also cites a U.S. statistic that “just 3.6 percent” of tenure-stream faculty members have a disability and suggests “we can assume that the majority of disabled Ph.D.s who do teach, do so as adjuncts.” Or are a substantial number of faculty members electing not to disclose invisible disabilities, including mental health issues? Folded into a discussion of “sick buildings” that reminded me of Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, Dolmage hypothesizes that “faculty and staff may willingly or unwittingly trade in their happiness and ‘balance’” for stress “camouflaged behind . . . autonomy, flexibility, and creativity” (Chapter One). "Stress" is non-specific and is inadequate as a diagnosis, yet it aggravates and precipitates a range of disorders. Dolmage makes the important point that the current approach to campus “wellness” emphasizes individual agency and disavows institutional responsibility. This is especially the case, I would suggest, in the case of staff and faculty, whose employee entitlements tend not to include on-campus health care.
While I wish he had more to say about faculty and staff, Dolmage does clearly outline the scope and limits of his analysis, and his discussion has already changed how I will approach working with students in the newly re-named “Accessibility” support services that, as Dolmage notes, tend to be underfunded.
Pryal and Dolmage have made important contributions to this growing number of works on academia and disability, which includes a recent collection of essays, Negotiating Disability: Disclosure and Higher Education. One welcome addition is Promoting Supportive Academic Environments for Faculty with Mental Illnesses, a resource guide developed by Margaret Price and Stephanie L. Kerschbaum and available free online.
New books about academia and disability by Katie Rose Guest Pryal and Jay Dolmage extend the important project of Margaret Price’s Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. While many of Pryal’s brief essays consider faculty experiences of navigating academia with a disability, Dolmage assesses how “students with disabilities have been excluded, the ways the academy has accommodated them,” and how “disability, as an identity and an epistemology . . . will continue to push us to understand teaching and learning in new, broader, and more empowering ways” (Chapter One). Both Pryal and Dolmage identify higher education’s hostility to disability and point to ways that academic environments can be reformed.
In Life of the Mind Interrupted, Pryal, who taught as a graduate student and then as a contingent faculty member, considers how race, gender and faculty status affect various aspects of academic work life, such as the decision to disclose disability to colleagues. Organized under headings—“Disclosure Blues,” “Collegiality,” “Teaching” and “Beyond the Academy”—these short pieces, many of which were previously published in the Chronicle Vitae and Women in Higher Education, provide pithy writing and incisive observations that draw on her own experiences and those of the people she interviews, as well as on published sources about disability.
Pryal pays particular attention to invisible disabilities. She quotes a contingent faculty member who suggests that stigma about mental health concerns is pronounced, since, “‘in academia, one’s brain is supposed to be the most essential asset one has.’” Asking for help, either informally or in terms of accommodations, threatens a loss of privacy and the exposure of vulnerability. Pryal notes that she taught “at the university level of twelve years without ever considering seeking disability accommodations,” disclosing her disability only to her friends until she left academia and began to write publicly about how poorly mental disabilities are addressed in academia.
Some essays are more advice-driven, as in Pryal’s suggestions about how conferences and other academic spaces could be more inclusive, or how faculty members who are uncomfortable listening to personal disclosures can guide students to appropriate supports. In her more autobiographically-inflected writings, Pryal provides forthright (she rejects the problematic descriptor “brave” for personal writing about mental health) discussions of how depression and suicidal ideation are compounded by shame. She also makes a strong case for universal design principles, because “the accommodations model requires us to disclose our disabilities” and “shifts the burden to the person with disabilities” to demonstrate entitlement.
Dolmage’s Academic Ableism, which uses as its title the Twitter hashtag inaugurated by graduate student @zaranosaur, describes how “academia powerfully mandates able-bodiedness and able-mindedness.” Throughout this absorbing, provocative, and insightful book Dolmage uses metaphors such as “steep stairs” and “the retrofit” alongside discussions of “imaginary college students” to explore how higher education is rhetorically as well as spatially constructed. The analysis is elegant and the examples are carefully selected. Writing studies and disability studies academics will benefit, and anyone grappling with student accommodation needs—that is, anyone who is teaching—should consider Dolmage’s important critique of how the accommodations process is weakened by a range of factors, from the power imbalance between faculty members and students to the limited number of formal accommodations (such as extended exam time) typically allotted to meet documented needs. The discussion of Universal Design’s potential neoliberal co-optation is especially crucial, as Dolmage wonders whether “a gesture toward UD” might be “a way to say ‘we don’t need to invest in any more accommodations’” for individual students (Chapter Four)
In Dolmage’s discussion, faculty members are part of higher ed’s gate-keeping, reviewing (with skepticism) student request/demands for legally-mandated accommodations. But what of the accommodation needs of faculty members with disabilities? Dolmage notes that faculty are largely outside the scope of his analysis, but he also cites a U.S. statistic that “just 3.6 percent” of tenure-stream faculty members have a disability and suggests “we can assume that the majority of disabled Ph.D.s who do teach, do so as adjuncts.” Or are a substantial number of faculty members electing not to disclose invisible disabilities, including mental health issues? Folded into a discussion of “sick buildings” that reminded me of Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, Dolmage hypothesizes that “faculty and staff may willingly or unwittingly trade in their happiness and ‘balance’” for stress “camouflaged behind . . . autonomy, flexibility, and creativity” (Chapter One). "Stress" is non-specific and is inadequate as a diagnosis, yet it aggravates and precipitates a range of disorders. Dolmage makes the important point that the current approach to campus “wellness” emphasizes individual agency and disavows institutional responsibility. This is especially the case, I would suggest, in the case of staff and faculty, whose employee entitlements tend not to include on-campus health care.
While I wish he had more to say about faculty and staff, Dolmage does clearly outline the scope and limits of his analysis, and his discussion has already changed how I will approach working with students in the newly re-named “Accessibility” support services that, as Dolmage notes, tend to be underfunded.
Pryal and Dolmage have made important contributions to this growing number of works on academia and disability, which includes a recent collection of essays, Negotiating Disability: Disclosure and Higher Education. One welcome addition is Promoting Supportive Academic Environments for Faculty with Mental Illnesses, a resource guide developed by Margaret Price and Stephanie L. Kerschbaum and available free online.
