#academic ableism

Anyway this Disability Wrath Month, a massive FUCK YOU to the Richmond, Indiana Community School System for forcing me to drop out before the completion of my junior year of high school because the truancy officer was threatening to "haul me off the toilet if I didn't get out of the bathroom in the next minute" and arrest me for having used up all my excused absences on having Crohn's disease. Never mind that the then-treatment for Crohn's disease completely collapsed my immune system less than a year before and I was six weeks out of school when I actively dying from shingles so severe there were pox all over my body, down my throat, up my genitals, and even coating my internal organs, that even when I was out of the PICU I still had to be hooked up to a constant PICC line dripping acyclovir directly to my heart at home with a nurse coming in twice daily, that when I was no longer contagious (and wouldn't it have been grand if the parents of the kid who gave me the first round of chickenpox six years prior had cared about being contagious so this didn't have to happen to me or anyone else) I had to go to school still completely scarred and weakened for months and could never catch up to the school missed even with summer school, that the stress of summer school year after year was already making me sicker to the point my hair was thinning on top of exacerbating my Crohn's, that after the disastrous results of the remicaid my pediatric gastroenterologist flat out said he wasn't comfortable treating me but refused to reassign me to another doctor so for the next two years until I aged out of pediatrics I was completely untreated and still very flaring, that this was the year I started developing celiac too so my free lunch was making me violently ill every day, and somehow ruining the sick kid's life by putting them in the carceral system or forcing them to ruin it for you by dropping out was a much better thing to happen then have your hopes for perfect school attendance record, a meaningless trophy, dashed for another year.

i forgot how much i fucking hate being graded. i'm literally doing a good job but because im running on disabled person time i get docked points

perhaps controversially (if unsurprisingly). i think certain online conversations have a tendency to replicate the kind of filtering and distancing which dolmage describes:

one of the most interesting aspects of academic ableism: disability and higher education by jay t. dolmage so far has been its discussion of the relationship between the academy and the asylum, and the conceptualization of both as spaces designed to separate particular groups of people from the general population:

Criminy I was just musing about how long it took me to finish writing assignments in first and second grade bc my hands had (and still) hurt too much to write for very long, and how I had to stutter my way thru an argument with my third grade teacher about wanting to be able to use the computer more bc typing hurt less, only for my teacher to smugly end the discussion when I accidentally said "I write faster than I type" instead of "I type faster than I write"

I want to argue that academic ableism faces specific forces of disguise and submersion. Because the sentiment that of course higher education is ableist is rarely coupled with a concern about this state of our institutions, and it is the job of this book to show how this ableism is a problem, and what can be done. But within academia, this feeling that there can be nothing done about the ableism of education, and that perhaps it is not even a problem, needs to be interrogated. What I would call "ableist apologia” describes a genre or category of statements and sentiments that distance the speaker from responsibility for the selective, stratifying forces within higher education, selecting and stratifying functions that depend upon ableism and disablism to make sure that privilege is portioned out only along traditional lines: to ensure that students who move, think, or express themselves outside of a narrow set of norms will not thrive or survive in college.

“A teacher/professor being ableist doesn’t mean we can afford to fire them! there’s a teacher shortage!”