Revised Pages Academic Ableism Revised Pages CoRpoRealities: Discourses of Disability Series editors: David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder Recent Titles Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability by Shelley L. Tremain Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education by Jay Timothy Dolmage Negotiating Disability: Disclosure and Higher Education by Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, Laura T. Eisenman, and James M. Jones, editors Portraits of Violence: War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement by Suzannah Biernoff Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature by Maren Tova Linett War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence by Anne McGuire The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment by David T. Mitchell with Sharon L. Snyder Foucault and the Government of Disability, Enlarged and Revised Edition by Shelley Tremain, editor The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel by Karen Bourrier American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History by Jenell Johnson Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability by George McKay The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing by David Bolt Disabled Veterans in History by David A. Gerber, editor Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life by Margaret Price Disability Aesthetics by Tobin Siebers Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability by Edward Wheatley Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing by G. Thomas Couser Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body by Michael Davidson The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Cultures of Blindness by Terry Rowden Disability Theory by Tobin Siebers A complete list of titles in the series can be found at www.press.umich.edu Revised Pages Academic Ableism Disability and Higher Education ••• Jay Timothy Dolmage University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor Revised Pages Copyright © 2017 by Jay Timothy Dolmage Some rights reserved This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial- No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc- nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid- free paper 2020 2019 2018 2017 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication data has been applied for. ISBN 978– 0- 472– 07371– 9 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978– 0- 472– 05371– 1 (paper : alk. paper) ISBN 978– 0- 472– 12341– 4 (e- book) http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9708722 Cover description for accessibility: The cover features bold colors and bold, oversize typography. Against a black background the word ACADEMIC is written in white and the word ABLEISM in red. The cover is not wide enough to accommodate the size of these words, so the words are intentionally broken: ACA-, then below this DEMIC, then below this ABLE- and then ISM (suggesting among other things that something in academia is broken). To the left is a small photograph of the sculpture Untitled (Spiral Staircase) by Peter Coffin. The sculpture consists of metal stairs that go nowhere, but instead curve back into themselves in one continuous tangle. The author’s name, Jay Timothy Dolmage, appears in the top left corner; at the bottom of the page is the subtitle of the book, DISABILITY AND HIGHER EDUCATION. Revised Pages For Marilyn Dolmage, still building inclusive schools ••• Revised Pages Revised Pages Acknowledgments ••• Thanks to all of the folks who have shared their energy and dedication through the Committee on Disability Issues in College Composition over the years, from my mentor Cindy Lewiecki- Wilson to my first, fin- est, and continued coconspirators Stephanie Kerschbaum, Margaret Price, and Amy Vidali, through to all of those who will continue this work into the future. Thanks to Brenda Brueggeman for tremendous, honest feedback. Thanks to the University of Michigan Press, the Editorial Board, and LeAnn Fields, for supporting not just the book but also its accessible delivery. This book is intended to be useful to others, to make space for future advocacy and thinking, and to be built on, critiqued, and exceeded. Like most academic work, nothing here is truly mine, nothing truly new or original. This book is the product of learning with and from others. If I could, I’d list hundreds of coauthors, with my name last. Revised Pages Revised Pages Contents ••• Introduction 1 Disability Studies and Rhetoric 5 Eugenics and Colonial Science 11 Snapshots of Exclusion 20 A Note on (Plain) Language and (Open) Access 31 Coda: Ableist Apologia 35 1. Steep Steps 41 Steep Steps to Ivory Towers 44 Eugenic Mergers 49 Building Disability 53 Sickness and Wellness 56 Climbing the Steep Steps 58 Creating Steep Steps 61 2. The Retrofit 67 Defeat Devices 73 Cover Your Ass 75 The Affect of Accommodation 79 From Eradication to Negotiation 84 Digital Curb Cuts (to Nowhere) 86 #AcademicAbleism 89 “A Rights- Demanding Bunch” 95 Revised Pages x • Contents 3. Imaginary College Students 99 Somnolent Samantha 101 Super Samantha 103 Slow Samantha 107 Critical Multimodality 113 4. Universal Design 115 Deep, Transformative, Tolerant, Redundant 118 On Futurity 121 Bringing Disability, Usability, and Universal Design Together 125 Histories 126 Critiquing Usability and Universal Design 129 Futures for Disability, Usability, and Universal Design 131 We Need to Talk about Universal Design 132 Posing Problems 134 Interest Convergence 135 We Need to Talk about Universal Design in the Neoliberal University 138 Landmarks 141 The Digital Lives of Universal Design 143 Checklistification and Neurorhetorics 145 5. Disability on Campus, on Film: Framing the Failures of Higher Education 153 Segregating Difference 156 The Educational Construction of Disability 164 Failure and Refusal 171 The Disabled Professor: How to Win an Oscar 175 Not Yet 178 Commencement 185 Notes 193 Bibliography 205 Index 223 Revised Pages Introduction The Approach ••• John Dewey, the famous philosopher of education, in 1895: “It is advisable that the teacher should understand, and even be able to criticize, the general principles upon which the whole educational system is formed and administered.” (199) As Ellen Cushman began writing about the “Rhetorician as Agent of Social Change,” in her influential article about breaking down the bar- riers between universities and the communities around them, she first described the steep steps of “the Approach,” a set of stairs, long in dis- repair, between the city of Troy, New York, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The Approach, for her, symbolized that which “prohibit(s) scholars from Approaching people outside the University” (374). Every day, she writes, “we reproduce this distance so long as a select few gain entrance to universities, so long as we differentiate between experts and novices, and so long as we value certain types of knowledge we can capi- talize on through specialization” (374). Here is a postcard picture of how the steps used to look (see page 2). The steps are made of a light gray stone. They are about 20 meters wide on their bottom flight, which is at the forefront of the photo, so that we look up from the very bottom. The steps narrow further up, at the point where two large cylindrical marble columns stand. The steps con- Revised Pages 2 • academic ableism Fig. 1. “Postcard: Approach to Rensselaer.” Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Library Archives, 1910. tinue to climb up to an imposing set of gates. Behind these gates there are green trees and foliage and, we assume, the university. Five people stand up near the very top of the steps and they look very small, giving perspective on just how steep and massive the approach is. The very fact that these steps are featured in a postcard reveals the ways that such structures are the stylistic and aesthetic center of many campuses. If we were to object that such steps make the university inac- cessible, many universities would make the argument that steep steps are stylistically desirable, that they fit with the template, the architectural fin- gerprint of the school: all the buildings are the same color, with the same size Ionic columns, maybe even the same number of stairs leading up to buildings. These counterarguments show the ways that in the construc- tion and maintenance of the steep steps there is also a latent argument about aesthetics or appearances, one that trips over to the classroom, into ideology and into pedagogy, where teachers are also sometimes con- cerned about pattern, clarity, propriety— and these things are believed to be “beautiful” (access Hunter).1 Today, the steps in this postcard are in ruins, but the ideology of the steep steps persists, at Rensselaer and elsewhere. Even as universities have become more accepting of diver- sity, academics tend to stay “inside,” as Ellen Cushman suggests. And the steps aren’t the only way in which the university is inaccessible, even Revised Pages Introduction • 3 if they might be the most physically arresting and apparent. As a select few stay in, disability is kept out, often quite literally. If it isn’t the steep steps of this approach, it might be the ornate gates you encounter in the approach to Ivy League schools like Harvard and Princeton—gates that are reproduced in a movie like Monsters University as emblematic of col- lege architecture and its ideology (more on this later). Lower Education Disability has always been constructed as the inverse or opposite of high- er education. Or, let me put it differently: higher education has needed to create a series of versions of “lower education” to justify its work and to ground its exceptionalism, and the physical gates and steps trace a long history of exclusion.