Introductions

We begin by introducing how we are positioned within this topic. Emily and Colleen, both of whom identify as having psychological and learning disabilities, share some of their undergraduate experiences throughout this piece. Emily identifies as a white, queer, first-generation, disabled doctoral student. Her work as a disabled student and educator in higher education is shaped by the intersection of privilege and marginalization. By engaging in this reflective process, Emily gained greater insight into her own experiences with ableism in the academy, as well as a greater understanding of the opportunities that she had taken for granted as a result of her privilege. Emily recognizes that her whiteness is a key component in the narratives that she shares in this article and as such, she will never fully understand the unique experiences of disabled Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.

Colleen is a white, disabled, queer woman, who at the time of writing this article, was in a master's degree program; she comes to this work with the desire for disabled students to have the same liberatory experience she had when she found her disabled identity and community. As a white, middle-class woman, Colleen acknowledges how her privileged identities shape all of her experiences with marginalization. From this project, Colleen further reflected on how deeply ingrained ableism is in higher education and the urgent need for intersectional disability justice.

Elisa, who identifies as a non-disabled, white, cisgender, lesbian faculty member, has served as a collaborator throughout this project. As a result of working with Emily and Colleen, Elisa grew more aware of the way she perpetuates ableism as a faculty member, despite her research and teaching in this area. She also grew more aware of the privileges she has as a white non-disabled faculty member who has been able to navigate higher education with relative ease because it was created and maintained for her mind and body. Together, we are committed to working against "academic ableism" (Dolmage, 2017) because our own and our students' liberation depends on doing so.

Emily and Colleen began this project by first drafting narratives that encapsulated their own lived experiences as disabled students navigating higher education. The purpose of these stories was to serve as the foundation of our analysis, providing first-hand perspectives into the lived realities of being a disabled college student. They were deliberate in their selection, choosing experiences they felt aligned with specific principles of crip theory, such as the fluidity of disability, interdependence, and crip time. Emily and Colleen paid particular attention to moments where there were instances of ableism in order to demonstrate the ways that inaccessible practices impact college students. They also chose to highlight experiences in which they experienced access beyond basic legal compliance to demonstrate ways that crip theory is already being applied in practice.

Both Emily and Colleen noted the emotional toll of re-engaging with their stories while writing. In many instances, remembering the ways that they had been misunderstood and perceived by others was painful to process in a scholarly setting. They found it challenging to process these experiences from an objective standpoint and as such, took their time writing in order to navigate the emotional complexity of the narratives while also maintaining their emotional wellbeing.

The way that Emily and Colleen engage with their stories changed also with the passage of time. Between the time that each narrative was initially written and the completion of a full manuscript, both Emily and Colleen transitioned from being full-time graduate students to full-time staff members at new institutions. Through everyday engagement with students in their respective capacities as an academic success coordinator and disability services professional, their roles as professional staff have provided yet another lens through which to make sense of the narratives that we share in this article.

Academic Ableism in Higher Education

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), an increasing number of disabled college students are entering higher education in the United States. In 2015-16, NCES found that 19% of undergraduate students reported having a disability (Synder et al., 2018). Although an increase in access for disabled students is a positive trend, ableism, which is "a system that places value on people's bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normality, intelligence, excellence, desirability, and productivity" (Lewis, 2021), perpetuates access and retention issues (e.g., O'Shea & Kaplan, 2017).

Indeed, higher education has historically perpetuated ableism (Dolmage, 2017). Starting with the eugenics movement that sought to eliminate disabled people, "[d]isability has always been constructed as the inverse or opposite of higher education" (Dolmage, 2017, p. 3). "Academic ableism" (Dolmage, 2017) recognizes higher education's eugenic past and describes how it continues to perpetuate the oppression of disabled individuals. Academic ableism has revealed itself through implicit and explicit practices and assumptions that are woven into the fabric of higher education. For instance, in 2017 there was a reinvigorated national conversation about faculty perceiving disabled students as "faking it" or receiving unfair advantages initiated by a professor at the University of Illinois who, in an email to a disability support services professional, denied a disabled student electronic lecture note accommodations, arguing that the accommodations may give an unfair advantage to the student (Flaherty, 2017). That rhetorical appeal is all too familiar to disabled students (Kerschbaum, et al., 2017). Resisting academic ableism depends on enacting the social and political/relational models of disability, including treating disability as a form of diversity (Kim & Aquino, 2017)

The Social and Political/Relational Model of Disability

Higher education has historically subscribed to the medical model of disability, viewing disability as a curable ailment in need of fixing to align with normative understandings of successful students (Evans et al., 2017). This medicalized understanding is apparent in how higher education responds to disability, that is, by directing students to disability services offices for accommodations (Evans et al., 2017). Requiring students to disclose their disability status to receive access forces students to pathologize their own being. Despite their mission to support disabled students, the work of disability services offices is sometimes grounded within a deficit framework, with the problem placed on the students, not the institutions, demonstrating the insidious nature of ableism (Abes & Darkow, 2020).

In contrast, the social model of disability removes the deficit from the person and places it on the system of ableism, emphasizing that society disables individuals. In using the social model, educators view disabled students through an anti-deficit lens, shifting the focus from fixing disabled students to fixing the practices that sustain and perpetuate ableism (Evans et al., 2017). Extending the social model, Kafer (2013; 2017) offered a model of disability rooted in critical and poststructural theories to encompass the political and relational aspects of disability. As both a political and relational phenomenon, ableism creates the conditions under which we all live, and the work to destabilize ableism helps make higher education a space where everyone can thrive (Kafer, 2013). Framing disability as political demands a focus on activism that resists disabling conditions (Kafer, 2013). Noting that impairment, like disability, is a social construction, the political/relational model also makes space for medical intervention, with an understanding that some disabled people do want and or need medical treatment (Kafer, 2013). The model makes this case without dismissing disabling social and environmental realities.

Enacting the social and political/relational models demands that disability be seen as a social identity, rather than an individual burden, and therefore should be included as a component of institutional diversity. Disability as a form of institutional diversity demands higher education to go beyond legal compliance in creating an academic environment that benefits all learners (Kim & Aquino, 2017). In doing so, it is important to transform how disability is perceived in higher education, moving from a fixed concept to a fluid identity. Centering crip theory in the conversation upends how disability is understood and re-imagines accessible higher education practice.

Crip Manifestos

Rather than relying on accommodation checklists for access that assumes predictable needs students can articulate, true access looks to the future, recognizing that "access [is] not…a synonym for justice but a beginning place for critical questions" (Titichkosky, 2008, as cited in Kafer, 2013, p. 157). Inspired by Kafer's (2013) call for reimagining disability futures, we draw upon her desire for crip manifestos (Kafer, 2017). Through manifestos, accessibility is conceptualized as a never-ending dedication to creating space for the "unanticipated, the unpredictable" (Kafer, 2017, p. 4). At the same time that educators work for a better future, they must attend to the present, finding where and how ableism manifests. In this argument for manifestos, Kafer (2017) employed Audre Lorde's (1988) description of "working for what has not yet been while living fully in the present now" (as cited in Kafer, 2017, p. 5). Educators must invest in the present in order to reimagine futures that desire and welcome disabled bodies and minds.

Our recommendations hold space for both everyday action and radical change, recognizing that educators are bound by the present reality while simultaneously pushing against that reality, and that "a politics based in futurity leads easily to an ethics of endless deferral" (Kafer, 2013, p. 29). Rather than only considering policies, crip futures require ongoing action. Manifestos recognize the fluidity of disability and actively address ableism as it manifests. Just as disability is fluid, so must be praxis, and praxis will be imperfect as it navigates working within and against ableism. Our recommendations therefore do not serve as checklist tasks, but as a crip manifesto that grows as educators continue to question and dismantle academic ableism.

Fluidity of Disability

Colleen:

The syllabus read "five pop quizzes for the semester," and my heart sank. When the class was over, I confessed to the professor that I was disabled and struggled with pop quizzes. I explained that they would have to send the quizzes to the testing center and therefore ruin the tests' element of surprise. I watched as their perfectly planned syllabus crumbled, and I was immediately met with their suspicion. To my professor, my accommodations were an unfair advantage and would result in me telling my peers of the oncoming assessments. I knew I needed to pour out my mad brain and thoughts to regain their trust and receive their support for my accommodations request. But this time I stayed quiet. I knew that I was risking my grade in the class, I knew that my professor would think I was incapable as my quizzes would be returned blank. Tired of this all-too-common fight, I worked without accommodations, my pop quizzes left with scribbles and half completed thoughts. After an onslaught of poor grades, I eventually gained the confidence to have the disclosure conservation with my professor, readying myself to defend my actions. My previous hesitations were correct: I had been coded as a "bad student." My professor questioned why I waited to request accommodations, because "if I needed them so badly, I would have gotten them sooner." With my head bowed in shame I bore my soul hoping it was enough to receive my accommodations. Once my professor decided I was "disabled enough" he sent the quizzes to the testing center. In the comfort of the center I thrived, my quizzes reflecting the hours I spent studying the course material. But now, I shifted from the "bad" student to the "cheating" student. My sudden "change in ability" was interpreted as academic dishonesty. I must have been using my accommodations to abuse the system. Now there existed another hurdle—a mutual distrust. My professor didn't trust that I was an intelligent student, and I could not trust that my professor wouldn't accuse me of academic dishonesty.

Emily:

I entered my first semester of music theory, as a first-year college student, with no prior knowledge of the material. My grounding in music came out of playing the clarinet and oboe in marching and concert band and singing in all of the choirs my school had to offer. Learning music theory was really difficult for me, and I was increasingly frustrated trying to figure out why I couldn't understand it. My professor was frustrated with me too, and I could tell that she thought I was lazy or that I did not care enough to do my homework. Maybe she just thought I wasn't smart enough to be in that space, even though it was an introductory course. I didn't do my homework, not because I didn't want to, but because I couldn't do my homework even when I tried. Eventually, my professor sharply said "is there something wrong with you that prevents you from learning in this class?" It nearly took the wind out of me. Was there something wrong with me that made me not able to succeed in the class she designed? When I processed what she had said to me, I looked at her and asked "Are you asking me if I have a learning disability?" and she said "Yes." I now understand now that this professor's attitude toward disability was rooted in a deficit framework. To her, I was doing poorly because there was something wrong with me. To be honest, I understood disability the same way at the time because of my own internalized ableism. I didn't identify as disabled, because I didn't realize that it was something that would ever apply to me. In my mind, if I had a learning disability, I would have had accommodations by then, but that wasn't true for me. Nobody had ever told me that I might benefit from them, so that must have meant that I didn't need them.

Both Emily's and Colleen's narratives reveal how compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness define disability and do so with rigid boundaries. In Emily's narrative, she had not considered the possibility of identifying as disabled because compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness dictated a fixed understanding of what disability looks like. Socialized through these norms, Emily believed that if she could not meet the normative standard defined by others that something was wrong with her rather than with the class. Likewise, the professor perceived Emily as the problem to be fixed rather than the class, perpetuating the idea that students are flawed if they cannot meet ableist expectations. In a related vein, Colleen identified as disabled, but her disability did not meet the rigid definition imposed by the disabled/non-disabled binary that compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness perpetuate. Recognizing that her professor saw disability as a fixed medical condition, Colleen was hesitant to claim disability because she knew that her professor perceived her as both abnormal and dishonest because she did not fit the ableist binary and its medicalized and legalized definitions of disability. Crip theory pushes back against this fixed meaning of disability, embracing disability as fluid.

Interdependence

Colleen:

In my time as an undergraduate student, I have only had one professor who truly invited their students into the learning process. After we read our disability studies syllabus, she would begin a conversation about access. As students, we were able to set fluid expectations for how we physically occupied the classroom, with some students preferring the ground over a desk and others offering space to get up and move around. Feelings about the lighting, desk types, classroom proximity to activities before and after class were all taken into account, often leading us to switch rooms entirely. She made us active participants in our learning, creating an atmosphere that welcomed dialogue. We felt safe to disclose our access needs, sharing how we best participated and comprehended material. We assigned note taking roles, granting all students a detailed summary of each class discussion and lecture. Assignments were flexible, allowing spoken word and art to replace what was traditionally written. We set due dates, but they were negotiable. As the semester progressed, there were no apologies for fumbled words, excited sounds, or antsy hands. Our class was built around trust and an understanding that everyone's contributions were valued. Interpreters and transcribers became part of the class, we greeted them and sent them projects and presentations early. We shared and treasured stories of triumph and turbulence, each of us feeling fortunate to be in each other's presence. The professor valued access; we left knowing what learning could and should feel like.

Emily:

As a music performance major, I was required to take group piano classes. No matter their piano background, students took the same four semesters with everyone else in their cohort. I had taken a few years of piano lessons when I was a young child, so I felt that I knew the basics. The first semester was pretty doable for me as it was mostly a review of the basic skills I had learned, but expectations quickly escalated—harmonic minor scales and their strict finger patterns, chord progressions, and improvisation. I had to learn these new skills in front of everyone else, which meant that we were able to hear everybody's progress, which heightened my anxiety. While everybody else in my class seemed to get a hold of the seemingly difficult things we were supposed to be learning, I could not get my hands to do what I wanted them to do, despite practicing every day with the electric piano I had in my room. Anxiety made this worse, and every time my professor would listen to me individually, I would make countless mistakes. There were a few instances when this would happen and my professor would ask me if I had been practicing and when I would reply "yes, every day," he would just shake his head or ask "well, then why aren't you getting any better?" I truly didn't have an answer for him. The further I got into piano classes, the more guilt and shame I began to feel for not being able to do what everyone else could do. My professor would often remind me that if I did not make any improvement, I wouldn't pass my piano proficiency at the end of my second year. I would have to retake piano until I passed the exam, which filled me with dread. Eventually the sight of the black and white keys of the piano made my stomach turn, and I stopped going to class. I wanted to stop feeling badly about myself, so I cut myself off from the site of pain.

Interdependence in higher education praxis resists the push toward independence rooted in compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness. Interdependence fosters access by encouraging community-centered ways of being and knowing. Interdependence still leaves room for people to do things on their own or be by themselves, but there is not an expectation that independence is the goal toward which all people should strive. Interdependence is integral to the lives of many disabled people. For instance, when describing how some disabled people have navigated the Covid-19 pandemic, Gaeta (2020) stated:

We are experts when it comes to isolation and pandemics. We know how to advocate for our legal rights as patients, navigate Medicaid and other private insurance claims, and stock up on supplies for weeks. We know how to live vulnerably, which is to live together. We know all this because for many of us, it's our daily reality (para. 6).

Cripped education depends on interdependence—vulnerability and working together. As Samuels (2020) said: "This is crip learning and it never happens the way we planned. But what I'm trying to say is, that's not just OK. It's good. It's ours. We're in this together" (para. 10).

Crip Time

Emily:

My fourth year of college—my senior year—began much differently than my first two years of college. I had just wrapped up an excellent third year where I excelled in all of my classes. I lived with my two best friends, and we had a great time. Entering my fourth year, I was riding the high from the first good year that I had in college. I encountered some struggle in the fall because I was no longer living with my friends who were my support system, but I made the best of it and finished the semester pretty well. In December, while I was traveling with my choir throughout the southern coast of Ireland, I received an email that said my application to graduate had been denied. My heart sank and left in its wake a strange ache that would pang every time I thought about that message. Even now, seven years later, I still feel the same echo of that shame-induced pain whenever I am reminded of this memory. This was my first experience with failure since my experiences at the beginning of college. I thought I had moved past my days as a "bad student," but this was a stark reminder of who I used to be, and perhaps still was. I didn't tell my friends about what happened until later into spring semester, because I was too embarrassed to admit my failure. The rest of the year was painful. I was depressed, anxious, and bitter that after all of the hard work I had put into "pulling myself up by my bootstraps," I still hadn't done enough to live up to my university's expectations. I graduated a year later, only because I had one faculty member who worked with me and a therapist who didn't view my college experience as a series of mistakes. They both understood me as a whole person rather than the student who just couldn't do things the right way.

Colleen:

It was a late Sunday evening when I began my disability studies homework. After a long first semester I was exhausted but eager to consume the assigned literature. I opened Alison Kafer's (2013) Feminist, Queer, Crip and was immediately shocked to find there was language for how I moved through time and space. It was in the first chapter when Kafer (2013) introduced the concept of crip time, explaining, "Crip time is flex time not just expanded but exploded; it requires reimagining our notions of what can and should happen in time, or recognizing how expectations of 'how long things take' are based on very particular minds and bodies" (p. 27). I had never considered how time interacted with my life, but these words revealed what I had perceived as individual failure were instead an ableist relationship to time and expectations. To discover there were others who thought and experienced time like me was liberating. Suddenly, I was no longer alone, but part of a community. I began to retrace how time had always felt like my enemy and now there existed a temporal plane that recognized and made room for me. Discovering crip time gave me the power to love and advocate for myself. Now, as a graduate student, crip time is a reminder that I am not the problem when I can only write in the middle of the night, or produce work on a tight deadline. I also realize now as a graduate student that my late realization of how temporality and futurity are tied to identity is a product of my whiteness.

Both Emily's and Colleen's narratives speak to the importance of crip time in higher education. Higher education is rooted in time, with temporal expectations ingrained into every facet of the institution, from the time to matriculate and graduate to the rhythm of a semester/quarter, to the pace of coursework (Miller, 2020). While disabled students are trying to keep up with the pace of college, they also have the additional burden of the time associated with the disclosure to accommodation process. Using the notion of crip time to analyze the pace of college, ableist expectations and assumptions about time emerge.