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Effects of Ableism10/29/2021 Content Warning: suicidal ideation I'm Autistic and have spent 15 years in higher education. I received a Bachelor of Science in Physics in 2005 before spending a year pursuing graduate studies in physics. After that I obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy followed by a PhD in Philosophy that I finished in late 2019. I primarily want to talk about my experience of ableism in academia. While I experienced ableism throughout my time in academia, it was much worse during my PhD. Consequently, I will focus my discussion there. I began my PhD in September of 2012 at the University of Western Ontario. Getting involved in the social life of university at Western proved to be significantly more difficult than it had been at other universities. My social quirks were more accepted when I was studying physics and I had little time for socializing during my BA due to a long commute. I found myself effectively ostracized at Western despite efforts to include myself in the life of the philosophy department. This ostracism was due to widespread social rules that aren't designed to include neurodivergent people as well as poor bodymind literacy on the part of people with no understanding of neurodivergent differences in socializing. I dealt with the occasional instance of overt ableism (e.g. being yelled at for displaying an Autistic trait, being gas-lit and/or victim-blamed when I tried to talk about ableist issues). However, that was a very small part of my experience. The ostracism and the harm that came with it were due to the constant bombardment of everyday instances of unintentional ableism resulting from ignorance. People can be held responsible for harm they didn't intend, they can be held responsible for their ignorance, and they can be held responsible for both. Ignorance or lack of intent can absolve one of responsibility, but it doesn't always. And ableism or discrimination more generally, is one area where it often is reasonable to hold one responsible for unintentional harm caused, in full or in part, by ignorance. One of the primary issues that many Autistic people face is extreme social exclusion. As with most forms of discrimination, the exclusion is often unintentional. Part of what that means is that no one has a conscious problem with my participation in the life of the philosophy department, but they unconsciously put various barriers in the way that keep me at a distance. Kip Williams, a leading expert on ostracism, has identified four types of ostracism. One involves physical isolation, one social isolation, and the other two are forms of verbal ostracism. I experienced the first two in the philosophy department at Western. The physical isolation came from people forgetting, repeatedly, to communicate information to me about events that resulted in my missing many opportunities. The social isolation came from being ignored even when present. This manifested in various ways: lack of eye contact, tuning me out as if my voice was background noise, and no comments directed at me. Because the ostracism was unintentional, there are a number of exceptions that arise when a situation is such that a person couldn’t get away with unconsciously ignoring me (e.g. none of the example issues I mentioned occur in one-on-one encounters between myself and someone else). And it wasn’t merely students, but also professors. Conferences, reading groups, coffee breaks held by the Rotman Institute of Philosophy of Science (located at Western), dinners with invited speakers, or various department social gatherings are the situations where the issues were most pronounced. It made it extremely difficult to do anything besides what I specifically required to do to complete the PhD program. Being an outcast was very damaging both psychologically and scholastically. Psychologically, I have to deal with anxiety, depression, loneliness, suicidal ideation, and complex PTSD. Just maintaining my currently poor mental health requires that I stay in London rather than move elsewhere where I would have to overcome significant barriers to develop a social support system. I’m not currently at risk of suicide, but I’m very certain that this would change rapidly if I left London. My chances of finding a job in London are awful even under the best of circumstances. In additional to the barriers I face simply as someone on the spectrum (statistics about Autistic employment put my chances of finding full-time employment as low as 15%), there’s both a significant lack of work in areas suited to my talents as well as the issue that many of the suitable jobs for my talents are unadvertised positions to be discovered through networking. Improving my mental health is extremely important in order to allow me to search for work elsewhere, but that is also tied partly to my financial stability (or lack thereof). In addition, my lack of opportunity to participate in department life has reduced my employability in academia. I couldn’t develop ideas I had that might have led to papers. I couldn’t network with faculty of other universities to make connections that could help me find work. The psychological issues also reduced the amount of work I could do beyond satisfying program requirements and prevented me from participating in training programs offered by the university that would have improved my CV. A common issue with discrimination in higher education is that they put various barriers in your way while you're a student, which in turn affect the “quality” of your CV, which in turn becomes a reason they can use to reject job applications. This kind of adding insult to injury seems to be pretty common. And it's particularly frustrating, to me, in higher education where the people putting the barriers in the way are the same ones doing the hiring. An employer outside academia might reasonably be able to say that it's not their responsibility to take responsibility for the barriers a job applicant may have faced in university or college that negatively impacted their CV. I don't think university or college faculty can say the same. Finally, my PTSD seems to be very much tied to the fact that I was studying philosophy of physics and, to some extent, philosophy of science more broadly. I became very interested in philosophy of disability and feminist philosophy after discovering them and am trying to pursue those areas as much as possible while surviving on social assistance. Despite my education, my employment prospects, both in academia and elsewhere, are significantly worse than people would likely believe. And my experience at Western is a big part of why they are as terrible as they are. The possibility of never finding full-time employment is also higher than most people would likely believe, as is the chance that I’ll eventually die by suicide. I provided the philosophy department a few opportunities to do something about the situation. The first was only two years after I first started at Western. The American Philosophical Association's Committee on the Status of Women visited the department to do a climate review in September of 2014. Despite the name they were open to examining climate issues regarding members of other marginalized groups as well. I had only recently discovered I was Autistic at that time and wasn't comfortable revealing that. Instead, I framed my issues in terms of introversion as I saw some overlap between ways to make academic environments more introvert friendly and ways to make them more friendly for Autistic people. And introversion seemed to be a much safer thing to talk about with, for example, the positive response Susan Cain' s book “Quiet” had received. The final report the committee provided did include some simple, and easily implementable, recommendations that would have made my experience at Western much better had they been implemented. The second opportunity I provided was in October of 2017. By this time I was open about being Autistic as well as very disappointed that the mere knowledge that they had an Autistic PhD student hadn't motivated anyone to think about examining and addressing anti-Autistic barriers in the department. Concerns about directly raising issues, particularly regarding all too common forms of retaliation, had me hoping, as futile as that might have been, that some of the issues I was facing would be dealt with pro-actively by a philosophy department that I was still hoping actually was interested in welcoming disabled people. But eventually I did arrange a meeting with the head of the department (who was also the head of the climate committee at the time) in October of 2017. Of course, nothing came from that meeting. No investigation into what could be done. It was basically just told “I don't know what to do so we're not going to do anything.” This was extremely frustrating in part because the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) requires a certain amount of proactive identification and removal of barriers and because it requires that complaints involve investigation into possible solutions. Although I don't know how AODA applies specifically to individual departments within a university. The final opportunity was provided in September of 2020. I sent a letter to the head of the department which was passed on to the Dean of Arts. While they expressed concern about my ongoing social isolation and reduced employment opportunities, they only directed me to resources through Western and the London community to which I already have access. That is, they did not acknowledge in any way the harm caused by my experience at Western or acknowledge that the philosophy department bears any responsibility to remedy or address the situation in some way. This was a year after I had graduated. It was my last attempt to get the department to privately recognize and take responsibility for the harm they've caused me before making my experience public. They've had seven years since my anonymous initial complaint, four years since my first explicit complaint, and one year since my last explicit complaint. I have shown an absurd amount of patience and the philosophy department at Western has made it clear that they won't make an effort to address ableism in the department unless forced to. Finally, because there are subfields of philosophy such as philosophy of disability and philosophy of race. One way to determine whether a large philosophy department, such as that at Western, values diversity is to see if they ever post faculty positions specifically for these subfields. The faculty at Western is large enough that there's no good reason for them not to have more diversity in the areas of philosophy its faculty members study. There's also no good reason not to favour disabled people when hiring someone for a philosophy of disability position. Personal experience of disability is incredibly valuable for such a position. It's something that should be considered a significant benefit. A benefit that a non-disabled philosopher can't bring to the position no matter what other experience they may have. Thank you to Nathan Moore for sharing his story.
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