The Cover
Dis/Ability
Academics with disabilities are too often under-represented in research, stigmastised or even forgotten in physical spaces. How can the higher ed sector create a more inclusive environment where everyone can thrive?
By Eugenia Lim
"The competitive nature ramps up the higher up the tree you go"
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People with disabilities in higher education remain under-represented and are arguably among the most marginalised, vulnerable and excluded groups on campus, making it often challenging to pursue a career in academia.
While it is routinely common for professors to accommodate students with a front-row seat in class or extended time on an examination, faculty members who have disabilities reportedly receive far less attention and thought. This is especially pronounced among academics who have an invisible disability such as chronic illness, mental health condition or is neurodivergent.
“The competitive nature ramps up the higher up the tree you go,” says Shane Clifton, Associate Professor at The University of Sydney. “It can be difficult to navigate any competitive environment when you face the challenges that come with embodied disability, the added barriers to inclusion that come from systems that aren’t working for them or attitudes of people responding to their impairment,” he says in an interview with QS Insights Magazine.
An accident in 2010 left Professor Clifton with a spinal cord injury, leading to quadriplegia. He has since authored two books related to his experience living with spinal cord injury, and was the Policy Director at the Australian Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation against People with Disability.
“We often underestimate people with disability because people just don't often encounter people with disability in everyday life,” says Professor Clifton. “That can actually be some of the challenges a person can face in a university system as students and then as a member seeking to grow their careers.”
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), one in six people experience significant disability - that’s 16 percent of the world’s population.
The statistic is in stark contrast to what is known of academics with disability. An estimated 3.6 percent of individuals with disability occupy tenure-line faculty positions at US institutions according to a 2004 study, while in the UK, the proportion of staff in universities declaring health conditions or impairments stood at close to four percent in 2012-13. In the same time period, 16 percent of working-age adults and nearly 13 percent of undergraduates reported to have a known disability. Meanwhile, an estimated one to six percent of Australians in 2018 disclosed having a disability within academia compared to 18 percent of the general population.
Academic ableism
“The biggest challenge confronting people with disability in the academic field is ableism, otherwise known as disability discrimination,” says Dr Damian Mellifont, a researcher at The University of Sydney.
Dr Mellifont, who is neurodivergent, says ableism has been described by scholars with disability as challenging career aspirations through bias in research funding assessment processes, unaccommodating work environments and patronising language targeted at people with disability.
He believes it is critical that institutions and research teams are inclusive because to do otherwise, is to risk producing harmful research results. “For example, a study that might attempt to perpetuate the myth that autistic people are lacking in empathy can have damaging repercussions for neurodivergent people,” says Dr Mellifont.
“Imagine a scenario whereby a job applicant discloses their neurodivergence and proceeds to perform well in their interview. However, after the applicant leaves the interview room, the panel chair says to the other assessors, ‘we don’t want this person, I just read in a well-respected publication that autistic people have no empathy’.”
In a widely quoted book titled Academic Ableism: Disability in Higher Education, authored by University of Waterloo Professor Jay Dolmage, it is argued that disability has long been constructed as the antithesis of higher education, often positioned as a distraction, a drain or a problem to be solved.
Professor Dolmage further asserts that disability is central to higher education, and that building more inclusive schools allows better education for all.
"Universities need to have more people in leadership roles who proudly, freely and openly disclose their disability."
Disability disclosure
Disclosure rates are often higher among students than staff, indicating people may not feel safe making their condition known within the academic work environments. Research has found that academic workspaces can be challenging, anxiety-producing and toxic work environments, especially for people with disabilities.
For example in Canada, 35 percent of university professors, instructors, teachers or researchers with a disability experienced ableism or unfair treatment and 47 percent encountered at least one form of harassment according to a 2020 Statistics Canada report.
With the majority of people with disabilities teaching in higher education as adjunct faculty, they are often not teaching enough hours, and not provided with medical care or insurance. This can make it challenging to go through the medical, physical or cognitive testing needed to gain access to legally granted accommodations.
And even after getting to that point, academics in such a position may still choose to stay silent on their disability status so as not to hinder their job security or career development.
In order to tackle this, universities need to have more people in leadership roles who proudly, freely and openly disclose their disability, says Dr Mellifont. He stresses the need for disability awareness and the education of hiring panels in addressing instances of unconscious bias among panel members.
“This representation shows other people with disability that leadership positions are attainable and there is no glass ceiling placed on their careers,” says Dr Mellifont. He adds that universities can become more inclusive of academics with disability in tenured positions through the implementation of strong policy such as quotas for staff with disability.
“Investment in this measure as a policy priority can help to increase not only the recruitment of people with disability into the academy but also the promotion of these people into leadership roles,” he says.
Dr Mellifont also suggests that disability research funding schemes need to value the ‘nothing about us without us’ inclusion mantra, by including criteria that requires people with lived experience of disability to be genuinely included in research teams. This means that such members should be reasonably accommodated and paid salaries that are commensurate with their skills and abilities.
"A change of perceptions is essential to improving the situation of persons with disabilities where there is a need to counter stereotypes and prejudices and to promote awareness of the capabilities of persons with disabilities."
Transforming beliefs
Changing attitudes towards persons with disabilities is a central part of creating more equitable work environments in academia. The United Nations Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities states that a change of perceptions is essential to improving the situation of persons with disabilities where there is a need to counter stereotypes and prejudices and to promote awareness of the capabilities of persons with disabilities.
One of the first steps is to develop a better understanding of their experiences and the impact that ableism has on them. “Disability experience is not a monolith,” says Cathery Yeh, an assistant professor in STEM Education at the University of Texas.
She explains there are three categories of disability - physical disability, chronic illness and mental health difficulties, all of which require different accommodations in any given working environment at any point in a person’s life. Even within physical disabilities, there is more than one legal definition of deafness or blindness, depending on state or country.
“This idea of who is able and who is disabled is actually not binary,” says Professor Yeh, who teaches a course on disability studies and disability justice in STEM education. “Almost everybody will be disabled at some time in our lives,” she says.
“This idea that disability is something that stays within one person for the rest of their life is not true,” she adds, highlighting that disability is fluid, especially when it comes to chronic illness or mental health.
“Throughout history, we know disability classifications have been used intentionally to perpetuate discrimination,” she tells QS Insights Magazine. “We make assumptions that if you have a disability, naturally most people think you are less capable. That then condones and allows discrimination.”
Professor Yeh says higher education institutions should rethink the ways in which accommodations for disabled persons are provided and how they consider and create learning spaces through universal design. This ensures that barriers to participation are taken down, and more people can thrive in the higher education space without even having to ask for permission to be accommodated.
Disability visibility
Beyond the logistics of adding closed captioning capabilities for the hearing impaired, or ramps for those on wheels, institutions must provide an environment where people with disability are present. “Universities need to redress a fear of disability by encouraging more contact with people with disability,” says Dr Mellifont. She adds that such contact has been identified in literature “as an effective anti-stigma strategy”.
“There’s nothing like living and working with people with disability every day to begin to change your attitudes to their capacity, to their contributions that they can make in the classroom of research,” adds on Professor Clifton.
“It’s extremely complex to change attitudes, and it's slow moving and generational and there's a lot of different steps,” says Professor Clifton. In his view, universities are well on the way to adjusting their policies, but it will take a whole other step altogether for those policies to have a cultural effect in the everyday world for people with disability. “The embodied reality of people with disability will affect their capacity to do certain jobs but it’s almost certain that in most cases, we underestimate what people will be able to do in certain jobs, particularly when we give them appropriate support.”