[nabs-l] Fwd: [DREAM:208] Chronicle of Higher Education article on Disability & Diversity

[David Dodge]

Hello Everyone,
I thought you might find this article interesting, I certainly did.

David
----------------------------------
David Dodge
Doctoral Degree Granting Institutions Rep.
State University of New York Student Assembly
English Major
University at Buffalo
306 Clemens Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260
daviddod at buffalo.edu


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Scott Michael Robertson <srobertson at ist.psu.edu>
Date: Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 12:30 AM
Subject: [DREAM:208] Chronicle of Higher Education article on Disability &
Diversity
To: "Disability Rights, Education, Activism and Mentoring (DREAM)" <
psdisabilities at googlegroups.com>


 Hi All,

I came across this article published in /The Chronicle of Higher Education/
via another email list. It exams the lack of representation of disability in
diversity discussions on college campuses. The author has an affiliation
with the disability and human development department at the University of
Illinois-Chicago.

-Scott

The Chronicle of Higher Education
Diversity in Academe
Why Is Disability Missing From the Discourse on Diversity?
By Lennard J. Davis

It has been more than 20 years since the Americans With Disabilities Act
took effect, but while the law has changed some things in higher education,
it hasn't changed the way academic culture regards people with disabilities.
While our current interest in diversity is laudable, colleges rarely think
of disability when they tout diversity. College brochures and Web sites
depict people of various races and ethnicities, but how often do they
include, say, blind people or those with Parkinson's disease? Or a deaf
couple talking to each other in a library, or a group of wheelchair users
gathered in the quad? When disability does appear, it is generally
cloistered on the pages devoted to accommodations and services.

It's not that disability is simply excluded from visual and narrative
representations of diversity in college materials; it is rarely even
integrated into courses devoted to diversity. Anthologies in all fields now
include theoretical perspectives devoted to race, gender, and sometimes
social class, but disability is almost never included. Indeed, in my field,
literary theory and cultural studies, The Norton Anthology of Theory &
Criticism had only one essay on disability in its thousands of pages, and
that was removed in the second edition. (Full disclosure: I wrote the
essay.)

I recently gave a talk about disability and diversity at a major university,
and a scholar of African-American history seemed nonplused that I would
consider disability as on a par with the oppression of people of color.
Indeed, one famous disability-studies scholar who taught at a historically
black college was denied tenure (subsequently reversed) for having made the
analogy between race and disability.

I would argue that disability isn't just missing from a diversity
consciousness, but that disability is antithetical to diversity as it now
stands. It seems clear, as the literary theorist (and my colleague) Walter
Benn Michaels points out in his book The Trouble With Diversity: How We
Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (Metropolitan Books, 2006),
that diversity nicely suits neoliberal capitalism. Michaels argues that the
idea of diversity functions to conceal financial inequality.

I would add that diversity also represses difference that isn't included
under the better-known categories of race, ethnicity, and gender. In other
words, diversity can exist only as long as we discount physical, cognitive,
and affective impairments. (The Americans With Disabilities Act defines
disability as "a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one
or more major life activities.") These need to be repressed because they are
a collective memento mori of human frailty; but more than that, they are
narcissistic wounds to the neoliberal belief in the free and autonomous
subject. The post-Enlightenment citizen's main characteristic is
individuality and the ability to craft one's destiny and choose one's fate.
But disability seems a lot less like choice and a whole lot more like fate
and powerlessness.

Colleges are not exempt from this way of thinking. Courses on diversity are
intended to celebrate and empower underrepresented identities. But
disability seems harder for people without disabilities to celebrate and see
as empowering. The idea presented by diversity is that any identity is one
we all could imagine having, and that all identities are worthy of choosing.
But the single identity one cannot (and, given the ethos of celebrating
diversity, should not) choose is to be disabled. No one should make the
choice that his or her partner be disabled, or that their child be born with
a disability. So how could disability legitimately be part of the diversity
paradigm, since it speaks so bluntly against the idea of choice and seems so
obviously to be about helplessness and powerlessness? If diversity
celebrates empowerment, disability seems to be the poster student for
disempowerment.

The rather limited underlying concept behind the idea of diversity in the
university is laid out in the philosophy: "We are all different—therefore we
are all the same." But if difference is being equated with sameness, then
how can being different mean anything? That contradiction is resolved by
finding some "other" to repress (an other whose existence is barely
acknowledged). That other is disability. What diversity is really saying, if
we read between the lines, is, "We are different and yet all the same
precisely because there is a deeper difference that we, the diverse, are
not."

That peculiar sameness of difference in diversity has as its binary opposite
the abject, the abnormal, and the extremely marginal—and that binary
opposition gives a problematic meaning to the general concept of diverse
sameness.

One of those deeper differences might be thought of as medical difference.
Medicine defines a norm of human existence, while diversity superficially
seems to reject norms. There is no "normal" human being anymore, as there
was in the period of eugenics. Diversity seems to say that there is no race,
gender, or ethnicity that defines the norm, as, for example, the white,
European male used to. Indeed, that is a tenet of diversity studies.

But in the realm of medicine, the norm still holds powerful sway. No one
wants to celebrate abnormality in the medical sense—no one is calling for
valuing high blood pressure or low blood sugar. There is no attempt to
celebrate birth defects or cancer (although we celebrate those fighting
cancer). The word that people most want to hear from the obstetrician is
that the child is "normal."

If diversity rejects the idea of a normal ethnicity, it has no problem with
the notion of the normal in a medical sense, which means, of course, it has
no problem with branding some bodies and minds normal and some abnormal. As
long as disability is seen in this medical sense, it will therefore be
considered abnormal and outside the healthy, energetic bodies routinely
depicted in celebrations of diversity. And let us remember that students of
color are referred to as African-Americans, Asian- Americans, and so on, but
on the medical side of campus, students with disabilities may often be
referred to as ... patients.

For a long time, in disability studies, there has been a cherished belief
that if we work long and hard enough in the academic arena, we will end up
convincing other identities that disability is a real identity, on a par
with the more recognized ones. That position still remains a hope, but I am
beginning to think that this opening up of the inner sanctum of diversity to
admit the abject may well never happen—not because scholars or
administrators are mean or ignorant, but because diversity as an ideological
paradigm and a course of study is structurally related to the goals of
neoliberalism.

As such, diversity must never be allowed to undermine the basic tenets of
free choice and the screen of empowerment that conceals the lack of choice
and the powerlessness of most people. Why should professors and students who
want to cherish and celebrate diversity be forced to realize that in so
doing, they are excluding from their consciousness the nearly 20 percent of
people in the nation who have a disability?

Although higher education has improved in providing accommodations and
services to students with disabilities since the Americans With Disability
Act, it has lagged very far behind in recognizing and incorporating
disability across the curriculum. The question remains: Is this simply
neglect, or is there something inherent in the way diversity is considered
that makes it impossible to recognize disability as a valid human identity?

Lennard J. Davis is a professor in the departments of disability and human
development, medical education, and English at the University of Illinois at
Chicago.