Academic Ableism

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.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, finest, 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. Contents In Canada, with a different but similarly devastating history of enslavement and dispossession, (nonetheless) university founders relied on what Ian Mosby calls "colonial science."I would define that as experimentation on aboriginal peoples in the name of or under the disguise of reeducation or assimilation, as well as the depletion of their connections to the environment and the deletion of their own forms of knowledge.This colonial science was thoroughly institutionalized and reinforced by government policy, at the same time establishing the knowledge and power of universities.These eugenic practices, and in fact eugenics itself, can be seen as the invention of the North American university, which in turn was also built upon the exploitation of people with disabilities.Colleges and universities were colonial projects-places for settlers to continue the work of forcibly changing their landscapes and these landscapes' inhabitants, but also as sites of a sort of internalized imperialism, because universities were mainly where North Americans went to Europeanize.Eugenics was not just implicated in these moves, but was in many ways the perfect ideological vehicle for the settler colonialism of higher education.More simply, academia became the place where North Americans could most efficiently destroy what and who came before European settlement.Eugenics-the idea that certain bodies were biologically inferior-was rhetorical fuel for this very efficient destruction.In Canada, there has been some public acknowledgment of this history, following the Canadian government's settlement and apology for the ongoing abuse of aboriginal children in residential schools.As the opening passage of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Report, developed as part of this ongoing apology, states: "For over a century, the central goals of Canada's Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada" (1).As indigenous scholar Richard Atleo writes in Principles of Tsawalk, the evolutionary ideas of Darwin were effectively transformed into eugenic rhetorics that were employed against indigenous people because they "created, for colonizers, a view of differences between people that was and is characterized by superiority and inferiority" (9).Absorbed early into political and imperialist domination ideologies, Darwin's theories of natural determinism justified the white European's central mythological conviction of racial superiority (Saul, 9).As Canadian public intellectual John Ralston Saul writes, "Canadians of 1. Movement-getting there-how we get to an event or class.2. Sense-being there-how we access the material, the conversation.

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