This semester will see a review into the Student Equity and Disability Service (SEDS). As part of the process, students with disabilities are encouraged to provide feedback on a system which is seen as underperforming. The incorporation of disabled voices into issues that affect them is positive, adopting a core principle of disability rights expressed by Brisenden and Oliver decades over. However, listening to issues is only the start, what is needed is follow though. While the intent to listen to the experiences of disabled people has grown in institutional areas, such as universities, the question remains whether asking will transition into doing. Research suggests that universities as institutions are not as welcoming in practice as they present in appearance. In deciding to review SEDS the University of Melbourne has indicated at change, but what will ultimately matter is whether efforts will be enacted. 

Ableism in Academia 

Disability scholar Dan Goodley argues that our economic and cultural systems promote select traits. Neo-liberalism, the hegemonic economic and cultural ideology of 21st century Australia, promotes competition, economic free markets, and individuality. These traits become ingrained in how systems approach problems and design solutions. For example, educational institutions when intertwined within a neoliberal ideology will shift towards promoting the economic benefits of courses and tie course outcomes towards employment metrics. Within disability itself this can be seen in the social prominence of medicalized understandings of disability, which aim to identify and treat deficits in the disabled individual. Not all these efforts result in a negative outcome. One positive example within education being Individual Education Plans or IEPs which facilitate pedagogical changes in response to specific needs. A potentially well-known variant at the University of Melbourne is the Academic Adjustment Plan or AAP. It is noted in the literature that IEPs have had a major positive impact in efforts for equal access to education. A caveat however is that the issues of stigmatization, recognition of disability and full accessibility to education, which constitutes far more than examination or assessment flexibility, aren’t necessarily addressed within IEPs. These factors are noted by Oliver as emerging from socio-political, and not psychobiological, factors which are typically addressed in models that empathise individual deficits at the expense of society wide limitations. This can be seen as a potential blind spot in systemic approaches towards disabled individuals, and one that has seen frequent criticism from the disability rights movement. It is important to note that ideology functions within institutions as a default. University's will typically reflect neoliberal constructions of disability for better and for worse: that is unless pressured to act outside those boundaries. 

The above point becomes pertinent in how ableism operates within institutions of higher education. Disability is perceived and reacted to in keeping with neoliberal ideas. In education this translates into a culture that promotes ever greater academic productivity and capability. As a graduate researcher this presents in the silent pedagogy of observing working academics, complete with increasing hours and workloads alongside the competitive push to publish, ideally often. Recent strikes have brought these conditions to more prominent attention, but they have been endemic to academic culture for some time. As revealed in an ongoing project by researchers Taylor and Sutton, out of the University of Canterbury and Flinders University respectively, neoliberal ideas are well established in university upper hierarchies. What gets little mention is how this outcome significantly impacts disabled students and academic staff, with a prominent research theme being how university systems act as gatekeepers to equitable access. 

The University system: Exploring IEPs 

Individualised Education Plans (IEPs) serve a critical function in ensuring the access of disabled students to education. At the University of Melbourne this takes the form of the AAP. The AAP may be familiar to readers of this essay, but for those unfamiliar the AAP serves to inform the University staff about student needs, learning adjustments, and support requirements.  Research highlights that IEPs when working as intended can be highly beneficial to students, an outcome contrasted by the struggles experienced in attaining IEPs and ensuring they are followed. It is noted by Fossey and colleagues that the process to obtaining an IEP can be complex for a new student to navigate. A student must proactively engage with multiple avenues of administration, have their disability validated within a medical framework, and negotiate adjustments from the relatively powerless position. The IEP process has been criticised in the literature as disadvantaging students without the financial means to receive diagnosis, those with ‘hidden’ disabilities, and for requiring students to disclose vulnerable information about themselves to receive any adjustment. It is perhaps then not coincidental that studies reveal that cohorts may avoid engaging in the process of obtaining an IEP, and once obtained refrain from taking full advantage of what they offer. Consequently, scholars suggest that there may be a population of disabled students that remain invisible to the university system. While disabled students are the primary beneficiaries of an IEP, they are products of a negotiation between students, administration, educators, and medical professionals. Moreover, students within this negotiation arrive with the least amount of power, despite the result affecting them most prominently. IEPs, while accessible to students from a disabled background, are only ever granted by the institution itself. The power for the student extends only to being able to make the request. A question should be asked, is education truly accessible when that accessibility relies on an institutional recognition of disability? 

Barriers to higher education are not just administrative or pedagogical. The impacts of disability go beyond assessment, and it is perhaps outside of teaching and assessment where universities most prominently struggle to live up to their expression of inclusion. For instance, the issue of stigma, awareness, and the requirement for a student to act as their personal advocate in the university system. Siebers, in his seminal essay Disability as Masquerade, highlights how stigmatising attitudes towards disability shape how it is perceived and responded to. Studies conducted within university   settings allude to Seibers argument, with staff understanding of disability at times resembling stereotypical accounts. Moreover, in certain subjects, such as psychology, students may be engaged in coursework which actively dehumanises them, an experience expressed by autistic researcher Monique Botha. Further complicating this issue is the possible need for students to educate staff on the fuller picture of their disability and ensure that their needs are being met.  The gap in understanding how disability is experienced versus how it is perceived can be large. Moreover, this gap can express itself in how a university can define reasonable in the term ‘reasonable adjustments’. Ultimately, this perception can be changed with effort. Although criticism has been raised regarding whether it should be the responsibility for the disabled student or staff to change how an institution sees them. 

The unfortunate consequence of this system is students who may already be struggling are required to individually put into motion the structures necessary for their educational success. Additionally, should students put into motion the process of asking for help it is no guarantee that help will be given. Rather the student must individually identify and justify a need for the support, to which a university can decide whether it is reasonable or not. In other words, the impetus for support is on the student, but the power to enact it lies with the university. The same principle could be said to apply within the SEDs review, the impetus to start the conversation lies with disabled individuals but the power to enact lies, again, with the institutional body. 

Expression vs. Effort

The core idea of this essay is to highlight the systemic imbalance between a disabled student or staff, who provide the information and the lived expertise, and the constitutional body with the ability to enact actual change. The SEDs review comes at an important point in time and overall reveals a commitment to attempting to address the issues facing disabled students. But an expression of change is not by itself action. The real question is to what extent will a university system inconvenience itself to alleviate the inconvenience of the disabled student body? At the current time the systems in place rely heavily on the initiative of the disabled individual to act as advocate and educator, ironically the SEDs review ultimately functions on a similar principle. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire criticises efforts at empowerment which merely improve an inherently unequal system. The goal, according to Freire, is to give minority groups the freedom to create the systems which they exist within. If the goal of the SEDs review is to improve the act of asking, then it misses the point. Our aim should be to bring our voice into the University of Melbourne’s processes, to be empowered not only as educators or advocates of disabled experiences but as decision makers. Perhaps what we need to ask for is the ability to stop needing to ask  

Bibliography 

Botha, M. (2021). Academic, Activist, or Advocate? Angry, Entangled, and Emerging: A Critical Reflection on Autism Knowledge Production. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.727542 

Brisenden, S. (1986). Independent Living and the Medical Model of Disability. Disability, Handicap & Society, 1(2), 173-178. https://doi.org/10.1080/02674648666780171

Cleveland-Innes, M. (2020). Student Demographic Change and Pedagogical Issues in Higher Education. In: Slowey, M., Schuetze, H.G., Zubrzycki, T. (eds) Inequality, Innovation and Reform in Higher Education. Lifelong Learning Book Series, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28227-1_11

Couzens, D., Poed, S., Kataoka, M., Brandon, A.D., Hartley, J., & Keen, D. (2015). Support for Students with Hidden Disabilities in Universities: A Case Study. International Journal of Disability, Development and Education, 62, 24 - 41. https://doi.org/10.1080/1034912X.2014.984592

Engel, G. L. (1977). The need for a new medical model: a challenge for biomedicine. Science, 196(4286), 129-136. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.847460 

Fossey, E., Chaffey, L., Venville, A., Ennals, P., Douglas, J., & Bigby, C. (2017). Navigating the complexity of disability support in tertiary education: perspectives of students and disability service staff, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 21(8), 822-832. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2017.1278798

Freire, P. (2012). Pedagogy of the oppressed / Paulo Freire; translated by Myra Bergman Ramos; with an introduction by Donald Macedo. Bloomsbury.

Gillespie‑Lynch, K., Daou, N., Obeid, R., Reardon, S., Khan, S., & Goldknopf, E. J. (2021). What Contributes to Stigma Towards Autistic University Students and Students with Other Diagnoses? Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 51, 459–475. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04556-7

Goodley, D. (2014). Dis/ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism. Taylor & Francis.  

Huda, A. S. (2021). The medical model and its application in mental health. International Review of Psychiatry. 33(5), 463-470. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2020.1845125 

Kendall, L. (2016) Higher education and disability: Exploring student experiences, Cogent Education, 3(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186X.2016.1256142

Mintz, B. (2021), Neoliberalism and the Crisis in Higher Education: The Cost of Ideology. Am. J. Econ. Sociol., 80, 79-112. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12370

Oliver, M. (1990). The Politics of Disablement. MacMillan. 

Petasis, A. (2019). Discrepancies of the Medical, Social and Biopsychosocial Models of Disability; A Comprehensive Theoretical Framework. The International Journal of Business Management and Technology, 3(4), 42-54. https://www.theijbmt.com/archive/0928/1686534688.pdf

Shamala, T., & Agbenyega, J., S. (2022). Insider perspectives on catalysing the development and use of individualised education plans, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 26(2), 160-174. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2019.1642401

Siebers, T. (2004). Disability as Masquerade. Literature and Medicine, 23(1), 1-22. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/disability-as-masquerade/docview/221218196/se-2

Taylor, N., & Sutton, Z. (2023, June 26). ‘Battered and broken. I must get out’: what staff told us about teaching and working in universities today. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/battered-and-broken-i-must-get-out-what-staff-told-us-about-teaching-and-working-in-universities-today-208179Tight, M. (2019). The neoliberal turn in Higher Education. Higher Education Quarterly, 73, 273–284. https://doi.org/10.1111/hequ.12197

Timothy, S., & Agbenyega, J., S. (2019). Insider perspectives on catalysing the development and use of individualised education plans. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 26, 160 - 174. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2019.1642401