Anti-Ableist Amherst: Writing Disability at Amherst College

“Disability,” Jay T. Dolmage writes in “Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education,” “has always been constructed as the inverse or opposite of higher education.” He describes higher education as producing its own version of “lower [less prestigious] education” in order to legitimize its especially sanctified status. Many commentators now decry college students’ increased access to accommodations within higher education, believing that these supports are essentially glorified cheating.

I have no answer to these accusations that can be neatly resolved in a 600-word opinion piece. Here, I can only offer myself. 

There is no simple way I can sum up my time at Amherst College. There is no way I can succinctly express my unending gratitude to the community I have made at Amherst, or the countless opportunities I have benefited from. A few years ago, I was a teenager with a laundry list of diagnoses, and I didn’t feel like I was much else. I absolutely loved to learn, but I found school miserable. (As I bemoaned in very typical angsty teenager fashion in 2020, “What good is a school with arbitrary rules and meaningless assignments?” Forgive me, I was 17!) The high-pressure, competitive, and frankly toxic and elitist environment of my high school often made me feel like I was stupid — to say nothing of the countless social challenges I faced. But outside of that environment, I found familiar and beloved companions in the writings of people such as activist-academics Angela Davis and Paulo Freire, and Marxist scholar Peter Drucker. Poring over JSTOR articles and twentieth-century left-wing theory alike gave me coherence and clarity in a world where I saw little. 

Entering Amherst as a nervous freshman away from home, I once again saw the differences between myself and everyone else. The familiar message of many after-school-specials did nothing to assuage the feeling that I was defective, simply not built for this world.

If I am not built for this world, there is nothing to do but build another. 

I have hoped, through my writing, to create that vision of a world that cares about and for disabled and neurodivergent people. I have not accomplished all I’ve wanted to do — realistically, there was no way that I could have written all I’ve wanted to write — but I’ve tried to do something meaningful within the pages of The Amherst Student. Since I wrote “Experiencing Ableism in Amherst’s Infrastructure,” I have felt a profound sense of purpose. It has given me a kind of path forward. I have worked to identify how my community and I have been limited beyond our medical impairments, but also by attitudes and environments that have failed to respond to our needs.

An ostensibly kind, but potentially harmful, narrative of successful disabled and neurodivergent students is that we are “inspirational.” As Eric M. Garcia writes in his 2021 book “We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation,” “to be inspirational means to be exceptional and somehow extraordinary, but to be successful because of supports and accommodations is to universalize our success. It is to say that other autistic people can do these same things if they have the same resources — thus, we can make the extraordinary just ordinary.” By finding ways to support all students, we can ensure that amazing success is not an aberration but a common occurrence.

I am deeply indebted to those who came before me — to all the disabled people who blazed a trail, talking about a subject mired in stigma with unflappable courage. I am particularly grateful to both the current and former students who have publicly written about disability and accommodations at Amherst, namely: Annika Ariel ’19, Rizwan Ayub ’27, Nora Gayer ’16, Flavia Martinez ’18, Elijah (then “Charlie”) Niedert ’25, Adrian Spratt ’76, and Jalen Woodard ’23. Thank you also to Connor Farquhar ’26 for speaking on the subject. I have learned greatly from you all, and I am honored to be in your company.

My goal has been to share a small segment of disability studies, disability politics, and perhaps a new way of perceiving and navigating the world with the readers of The Amherst Student. Writing these pieces has brought me fulfillment and joy far beyond what I would have imagined. 

I am thankful to everyone who has read this column, even if all you did was ponder the ideas. To have my words considered seriously is an incalculable blessing. 

I am especially thankful to all the disabled Amherst community members — students, alumni, faculty, staff, parents, and everyone who has been impacted by or is connected to this school. It is a challenge not only to struggle against the limitations of one’s body and/or mind, but an even more profound and existential challenge to endlessly persevere in a society that has not yet accepted divergence from its narrow norms. Thank you for being here, thank you for being you.