Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education by Jay Timothy Dolmage (review)

This important and welcome monograph from Jay Timothy Dolmage should be of great interest to devotees of Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies; if only it could somehow be assigned as required reading for those who are not already invested in, or even aware of, disability-inflected discussions of cultural institutions such as higher education. Dolmage has set for himself a daunting task in taking on the topic of academic ableism; indeed, he characterizes it as something of an "impossible challenge" (58). His book's charge is "not just to recognize where and how ableism happens, but to ask what the impact will be of exposing it, what the cost might be of assigning blame, and what the forces are that make it imperceptible, what the euphemisms are that disguise it, and how it comes to be normalized, even valorized in academia" (58). Just as crucially, he further hopes his project will push its audience to confront questions such as, "if disability is in part socially constructed by academia, how do we feature and highlight the constructions that make space for agency, community, solidarity, and resilience?" (58).

Dolmage sets up his argument in a superb Introduction. Opening with a nod to the powerful rhetorical embodiment of academic inaccessibility first identified by Ellen Cushman, the Approach at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Academic Ableism begins its analysis of "the university as a rhetorical space that holds a history of injustice in its architecture" (9) by exposing how "higher education has needed to create a series of versions of 'lower education' to justify its work and to ground its exceptionalism," inverse reflections of itself often aligned with "shadow locations" such as asylums, immigration stations, and prisons (3). That "one studies" while "the other is studied" is indicative of the veracity of Tanya Titchkosky's assertion that academia views disability as a "problem in need of a solution" rather than as an "important form of critical knowledge production" (4), and it leads Dolmage provocatively to proclaim, "there is no more ableist location than the university" (7).

After noting higher education's inextricable imbrication with the shameful histories of eugenics and colonial science, Dolmage transitions into a disheartening assessment of the state of the university in the present day. Statistics on underused and ineffective accommodations (here, for faculty/staff as well), attendance and graduation delays, heavier debt, etc. for students with disabilities—combined with the frustrating realities of how overworked and underfunded disability resource offices continue to be—reveal in very sobering terms the persistent ableism still preventing so many disabled people from fully accessing, much less successfully navigating, the world of academia. What is more, Dolmage's observation, "The programs and initiatives that are developed in the name of diversity and inclusion do not yet deliver tangible means of addressing the ableism inherent in higher education" (26), sadly is all too true.

Dolmage's elaboration, near the end of his Introduction, upon the three phases of academia's relationship to diversity identified by Wendy Brown works as a particularly productive segue into the three spatial metaphors around which his own argument will revolve. The first of these phases, "the era of disabling studies and disability studied" (27), is embodied by the steep steps of exclusion exposed in Chapter 1; the second, the qualified equal access provided by "a medical and a liability model" (27), corresponds to the retrofit of limited response delineated in Chapter 2; and the third, neoliberal lip service regarding diversity sans empowerment or structural change (28), represents the simultaneous progressive advancement and regressive appropriation of universal design's inclusiveness as documented in Chapter 4.

As Dolmage aptly insists, "spaces and institutions cannot be disconnected from the bodies within them" (43). The traditional but still ubiquitous steep steps associated with university settings (along with their concomitant walls and gates), designed to surveil as much as to protect, historically have served as a fitting emblem of academe's eugenicist heritage...