April 9, 2024

The theme of these conversations is “at the nexus of race and disability.”

First, I would like to take a moment to imagine that relationship not as a nexus or linkage but as an intimate entanglement—and one that is very old. The literature is full of discourse on race as pathology from accusing Cuban refugees in New Orleans of causing Yellow Fever in the 1870s to medical apartheid and extractive experimentation deep into the 20th century, especially against Black women. This pathologization excludes racial and ethnic minorities from the body politic of the American project. I want to focus briefly, however, on a corollary concept in the United States: race as disability. Not only unsanitary, exterior, undesirable, stigmatizing, but actually incapacitating. 

I name and frame this connection this way because in learning spaces, the disenfranchisement of marginalized peoples is explicitly predicated on being un-able, in-capable, dis-abled. 

The practice of this is ubiquitous. We are introduced to the ugly monstrosity that is an Indigenous Caribbean man by the name of Caliban in our 10th grade English classes when we’re handed Shakespeare’s The Tempest. As Safiya Sinclair forcefully reminds us, Caliban was transliterated into the modern word cannibal, rendering Caribbean peoples, by name to the rest of the world, savages. In the western Anglophone tradition, this is one of the earliest, most prominent, and enduring literary and racialized depictions of Indigenous peoples in the New World. It makes no mention of color, only passing mention of specific features, but at great length details his horridness. These tropes and stereotypes of so-called non-normative peoples trap Indigenous men, women, and children into caricatures that think as slowly as they speak; Black folks as delinquent and unfit for family life; Mexican and Filipino farmworkers, their arms and bent backs, property laboring for empire; and women as ‘hysterical’ or clinically promiscuous.  

In the United States, so much of our prejudice begins and ends with bodies not people. American racism and ableism are inexorable. It is, therefore, precisely in this way that our liberation is also inseparable. 

This same allergy to disabled people in all their forms is pervasive in education. At so-called elite universities, this dynamic is inflamed: how can you be dis-abled and academically excellent? If you find yourself here, isn't it true that accommodation or accessibility cheapen academic or intellectual achievement? These are questions I have heard posed with sincerity by faculty on Yale’s campus. 

Beginning in the 1920s, this flagrantly unique flavor of American racism, ableism, and exclusion took the name of eugenics: a contrived and manufactured ideology that enjoyed purchase on mainstream U.S. thought, drawing its legitimacy from respected and credentialed names that lent their authority to an incoherent practice of controlled selective breeding and sieving of human populations.

This political ideology, dressed in scientific language, arrived in New Haven in 1924. Therefore, Yale’s relationship with eugenics, while obscured and until very recently neglected, is not old. Less than a century ago, eugenics had an “especially sympathetic administrator" in Yale's 16th President, James R. Angell (1869-1949). A man who, in 1933, wrote that “if we could have an Armenian massacre confined to the New Haven District, with occasional incursion into Bridgeport and Hartford, we might protect our Nordic stock almost completely.” An ideology that informed the ways in which the Institute of Psychology (the early precursor to the pernicious  Institute of Human Relations) ushered in a culture of clinical eugenic practice and urban renewal upon an unconsenting city in a fashion dark and fraught with personalities, egos and dogma until late into the 1960s. The American Eugenics Society quickly identified New Haven as a comfortable and welcoming home, moving into 4 Hillhouse Avenue in what has been described as “easy walking distance” to the president’s office. And the AES and its proselytizers remained unapologetic  in Yale admin and faculty until Yale’s 19th President, Bart Giamatti, a prominent scholar of Italian descent assumed office in 1978 (1978-1986), upsetting the university’s embedded, eugenics-driven, Anglo-Saxon mentality in his advocacy for Italian-American and Jewish students previously considered unfit for the institution. 

The University’s role in eugenics (and endorsement of it) ought to be considered unambiguous. Commentators on Yale have suggested that “[w]ithout explicitly aligning departments or institutions as eugenic organizations, the history of eugenics is entangled deeply within Yale’s history in ways we continue to uncover.” However, the ways in which eugenic practice continues to inform the contemporary treatment of its students, remains an open question. One naturally asks: to what extent is the modern institution living its former leader’s project of “launching a great movement which is destined not only to achieve distinguished success within the walls of Yale” but across the country?

I first arrived on campus as a prospective student in April of 2019. I came to discover that disability resources in higher education are often neatly hidden from view. At Yale, this takes the form of a building whose address is on Broadway while its entrance is across a courtyard from Morse College and whose elevator was only sporadically operational. At one point during that early April session, I left the pandemonium to register with disability services and gently inform them that they had placed me, a wheelchair user, on the second floor of an elevator-less building. It was in my lingering there that I met Rose. Then president of Disability Empowerment for Yale (2016 - ) and graduating in a matter of weeks, Rose was spending her final days at Yale greeting matriculating students with disabilities. She delicately introduced me to a new sort of life. My public school background had me familiar with 504 Plans and endless paperwork, check-ins and accommodations. Rose, however, rapidly disabused me of such frivolousness. There were blacklisted faculty to avoid at all costs, or else risk never getting accommodations. There were hushed warnings, while in their office, about a staff who, full of good intentions as they may be, were simply overwhelmed. (It was true, of course, that five people supporting 900 individual cases was unworkable.) In those days, the organized disability community was in its infancy. The number of people actively involved with the likes of DEFY couldn’t fill the seats around a conference table. 

Our organizing goals were lofty. Nothing less than full accessibility, visibility and recognition in university spaces. Because we all knew full well that our illegibility did not start and stop in the classroom, the enormousness of the task alone served as a deterrent to mobilization. Social spaces were overwhelmingly inaccessible. So was housing and dining halls. Normal and healthy adult life was made acutely painful. The situation was so dire that one provostial advisory committee in a report summarized the landscape plainly: “Yale does not currently have a clear, comprehensive institutional strategy to educate the campus community on ways to improve accessibility and foster inclusion of the disability community in all aspects of campus life.” 

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in spring of 2019 and the world was plunged into isolation and medical anxiety, the University stood up a committee on accessible education in the pandemic chaired by Larry Gladney. After months of trying to share our message about the importance of disability and accessibility in crafting equitable learning strategies, we were finally slated for a ten minute presentation in late July. I stayed for over an hour answering questions. One committee member at the end of my time surprised me with her flippancy. “Wow, where have you been this whole summer?” she asked, “We could have really used you. Too bad our recommendations [to the President] are due on Friday.”

We have repeatedly been forced to confront the truth that laws and policy are passed and implemented to render us malcontents, or further the image that the disabled are those cared for by people who will “read to them in the dark.” The diversity of disability life and experience is collapsed into an accommodation. Enacted in 1990, only four years after Bart Giamotti’s presidency, the ADA is a minimum benchmark for which institutions of higher education too quickly pride themselves on being compliant. Such has been the way disabled learners have navigated education over the last three decades. The ADA is today limited and weak. Where does that, in the end, leave us? 

One way of framing this is to acknowledge that there exists an uninterrupted throughline from Angell in 1924 and a certain former Yale College Dean proclaiming matter-of-factly in a private meeting that there will simply never be a disability cultural center, or anything like a dedicated campus space for the disability community, so long as he was dean. He claimed that while the Cultural Center model worked for other marginalized communities, disability as anything like a culture or cohesive group was incoherent, undeserving of institutional recognition. We spent two years in meetings demanding reform: Student Accessibility Services expansion, closed captioning, community spaces and peer programs. Many of those countless hours with that same dean who once chided me, saying that him even knowing my name was evidence enough that he took our agenda seriously. 

There is an institutional history that accounts for the fact that whereas other institutions were pioneering access and resources, Yale was acutely behind. Staff at the Student Accessibility Services (formerly the Resource Office on Disability, established in the early 1990s, and rhymes eerily with Institute of Human Relations), ostensibly our closest institutional allies, actively discouraged us from organizing. They pointed to an apathetic higher administration that would not take us seriously. (Regrettably, for the lion’s share of my time, they were right enough about that.) But in truth, they were themselves fatigued by an institution that I suspect did not regard their profession as credible. Light and Truth and elite academic excellence are perennially perceived as being allergic to difference viewed as deficit. It was far from only administration. 

Why did Michelle Morgan, digital accessibility specialist at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, for years regularly provide faculty accessibility and accommodation training for audiences of one or none? This proliferation of pathological classifications—the able, capable and gifted on the one hand and the disabled, accommodated and matriculated but undeserving on the other—is an intimate part of the disability experience of Yale students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Yale does not advertise it but across schools the incompletion rates are highest among students with disabilities and disabled students experience sexual violence on campus at a rate higher than any other demographic. These prejudices are best understood not as some Eugenics Lite, or Ableism 2.0, but instead as coming directly out of the playbook of what Michael Rembis terms Old Eugenics (1835-1960). That is to say, they belong to that old vanguard of thought that is obsessed with fitness, worthiness and competence. Seen in this light, Yale’s treatment of its disabled students is not a replication but an afterlife of eugenic projects committed to imposing impossible expectations on its disabled students, only to withhold support when they ask for it, and show them the door when they fail to comply with the standards articulated by the institution.

It was around these challenges that students on campus organized. As part of its long tradition  of weaponizing the double weight and threat institution to alienate and coerce disabled bodies, Yale had for decades a punitive medical withdrawal policy that stripped sick and disabled students of their student rights and (more than any other leave policy) did not end in readmission. A process, by the way, which burdened students by requiring credits at an acceptable non-Yale institution, undergo full and invasive medical evaluations, secure letters of support, and evidence of employment. I am proud to say I was in a small way involved in changing these practices, which we deemed discriminatory, and resulted in a lawsuit against the University. An effort, it is imperative to highlight, precipitated by loss of Rachael Shaw Rosenbaum by suicide directly as a result of the University’s incapacity to account for disability and need. 

Rachael’s death came right as that former dean, who had made it his favorite pastime to take our meetings only to tell us no, finally agreed to pilot a SAS Peer Liaison program (the first in twelve years) and fund the all-volunteer Disability Peer Mentor Program headed by Josie Steuer Ingall (an undergraduate student who continued to run the program). He then worked with us to triple the SAS Office which at that time was serving nearly 2,500 students across the schools. When he vacated his deanship, these major innovations in accessibility, including heralding an inaugural vice president for accessibility, were centerpieces of the legacy he plastered in every outgoing e-mail and University function.

I will conclude with this: 

The duplicitousness of the institution is one way in which the afterlives of eugenics at Yale are different now than their predecessors were a century ago. At the time of my arrival, while in material ways the University remained dedicated to marginalizing and dragooning students it considered disabled, it committed its ugliest umbrages in a manufactured silence, and the rest masked behind the veneer of Belonging at Yale. In placing my experiences, and those of the community, in conversation with archival silences like the ones addressed in the recent scholarship, we begin to see that while higher education is rife with ableism, Yale as a site of study and organizing remains particularly sticky. This ick is perhaps appropriately understood by the University's commitment, explicit or otherwise, to occlude its eugenically informed past and present. 

Speaking with you today, I am filled with gratitude for the work that a new generation of organizers and thinkers are undertaking. My ability to apply specific language to our highly unusual experiences on campus really began with the work of my peers and other students. It remains a deeply held commitment that our labors in pursuit of liberation must necessarily be grounded in history. This is particularly true in the face of bloated institutions like Yale which would have us believe there is no history to tell and no present to change. Mercifully, for future generations of disabled students and organizers, history and our place in it is more accessible than ever.

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My deepest appreciation for Kenya Loudd and her advocacy on behalf of disabled folks, notably creating the now annual Yale Symposium on Disability & Accessibility, which I have been honored to speak at on multiple occasions. And to Daniel HoSang, for many things, but particularly his steadfast commitment to unearthing eugenics and its afterlives in New Haven.