Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life

Introduction

Introduction Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind. —Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, 1816 If you are crazy, can you still be of sound mind? This is not an idle question: I am crazy (although I don’t usually use that word to refer to myself), and I make my living by using my mind. I’m a professor of composition and rhetoric. I spend most days thinking, talking, and writing. Some of my students have been crazy. Colleagues too. Most of us are good at academic work, although the opportunity—or rather, the privilege —we have to engage in that work varies widely. When you hear that someone is “crazy,” a host of stereotypical images may come immediately to mind. For instance, you may picture a homeless person muttering on a bus; a ‹gure lying restrained on a hospital gurney; or a dull medicated gaze.1 You might also think of danger, for a common assumption about mental illness is that it goes hand in hand with violent behavior. Often, when I talk about madness with colleagues or friends, they mention ‹lm and television images of violent insanity; they associate madness and threat. Or they may refer to the recent shootings on college campuses: Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois, the University of Alabama–Huntsville (UAH). They might even say—as one commenter on a Chronicle of Higher Education blog did—that we seem to be in a new age of threat from “academic psycho-killers.” In the face of such images , it is rarely persuasive to point out that madness is usually not threatening—at least not in the immediate physical sense. People with mental disabilities do move in an aura of constant violence within insti- tutions, but as several scholars have observed, most of the violence comes not from these individuals but is instead directed at them.2 Alternatively, the image that springs to mind may be that of the extraordinary mad person, a star like Nobel Prize–winning mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. as portrayed in the ‹lm A Beautiful Mind. That ‹lm upholds a truism about mental illness, namely, its link to creative genius. (It also upholds another truism, which is that in order to overcome one’s madness, one must simply refuse to tolerate it—“Just Say No” as cure—but that’s another story.) The commonsense link between madness and genius arises again and again, in stories about real people like composer Robert Schumann, who is said to have been bipolar (“Portrait”), as well as ‹ctional characters like Sherlock Holmes, whose meticulous attention to detail has been suggested to indicate Asperger’s syndrome (Sanders). This book focuses on manifestations of madness—what I call “mental disability”—in the academic realm. I’m interested in the ways that mental disability affects the lives of students, faculty, and staff in U.S. higher education. I am also interested in the ways that mental disability is identi‹ed and valued (or, more often, devalued) in this space. Although I do refer to studies that make use of empirical data such as the prevalence of mental disabilities among college students, my concern is focused more upon the ways that we decide who is mentally disabled in the ‹rst place, and what we do once we have decided a person should be labeled as such. Put simply, I am interested in the stories that are told about mental disability in U.S. higher education. Who tells the stories? Who is privileged or deprivileged through the telling? In what ways might we want to change the stories we are telling, the ways we are imagining the proper place of the disabled mind in college? Indeed, do we even know what it means to have a disabled (unsound, ill, irrational, crazy) mind in the educational realm, a realm expressly dedicated to the life of the mind? In U.S. higher education, both the “creative genius” and the “violent” stereotypes are referred to regularly. Faculty members who display “quirky” behavior are sometimes regarded with affection: think of funny Professor X, who mumbles in the hallways and perhaps wears outlandish out‹ts. (For what it’s worth, my anecdotal observation indicates that quirks are more welcome in academe when displayed by a person who is white, male, and/or tenured; but that is only my observation.) Sometimes , less benignly, faculty members are labeled “dif‹cult” and become 2 Mad at School [3...