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How do we create change when such change can be so quickly and easily problematized? In his book, The Rhetoric of Reaction, Albert O. Hirschman suggests that there are three specific ways that people defuse efforts to create change: 1. The futility thesis holds that nothing we do can have much positive impact at all. 2. The perversity thesis suggests that anything we do to help also creates harm. 3. The jeopardy thesis argues that any change we make will likely endanger something else, something already established, something much more important.

— Academic Ableism by Jay T Dolmage

The one checklist I would be inclined to accept is the simple three-part approach to Universal Design for Learning, as mentioned earlier: • Multiple means of representation, to give learners various ways of acquiring information and knowledge, • Multiple means of expression, to provide learners alternatives for demonstrating what they know, • Multiple means of engagement, to tap into learners’ interests, offer appropriate challenges, and increase motivation. Yet when we begin to break these “multiples” down into short lists of strategies, UDL curls up into a ball or folds up into a small package. The very idea that education is about not just representation but also expression and engagement is somewhat revolutionary in a world of 500-­student classes in which lectures and exams are the norm and a course’s content is almost always what a textbook or a professor says, rather than what students think or create.

— Academic Ableism by Jay T Dolmage

My warning here is that UD is becoming a neoliberal industry within higher education. While I have offered warnings about the neoliberal dangers of Universal Design in other work, Aimi Hamraie also puts these dangers in stark but brilliant terms: when neoliberal values for UD take over, UD concepts “become marketing tools” and critical discourses “drop out” (n.p.). As David Harvey might say, UD is subject to neoliberal “creative destruction” (“Neoliberalism,” 3). This destruction leads to replacing hard-­fought provisions with new contractual relations that in fact remove the university or college from responsibility for individual students’ rights, and demand that each individual manage their own access.

— Academic Ableism by Jay T Dolmage

We Need to Talk about Universal Design in the Neoliberal University

In the last chapter, I suggested that it is likely true that retrofits, in other contexts, can be much more useful and powerful than they can be in higher education, mainly because of the persistence of academic ableism in universities and colleges. Maybe, in the same sense, Universal Design can only do so much in the context of higher education, because of the persistence of both academic ableism and academic ableism-­inflected retrofits and defeat devices.

— Academic Ableism by Jay T Dolmage

This problem of universality is of course connected to normativity. We might suggest that most claims to universality also subsume the possibilities of rich and meaningful particularity. For instance, as Robyn Wiegman suggested, “critical race theorists have assumed that the power of whiteness arises from its appropriation of the universal . . . the universal [as] opposed to and hence devoid of the particular” (117). Yet she argued that, insofar as this assumption is made, “we have failed to interpret the tension between particularity and universality” (117). Wiegman argues that normative and unexamined structures must be rendered particular so that we might understand their power. Likewise, I would argue that we can look for the universal possibilities of particularity. More simply, student learning differences should drive design, should be designed towards.

— Academic Ableism by Jay T Dolmage

My definition of UDL, adapted from Bowe, emphasizes expanding three vectors of the classroom dynamic. One focus is on how the teacher instructs—­how we deliver information and engage students in the most accessible manner possible. Another focus is on active learning by students—­varied forms of applied and interactive learning, with course materials and within a diverse community. The third focus is on multiple options for student design, delivery, and expression—multiple ways for students to show what they know, share their ideas, compose for varying audiences, and then revise. These foci necessitate less teacher dictatorship and greater communal shaping.

— Academic Ableism by Jay T Dolmage

We need to consciously work against the values and habits and biases of mainstream design practices.

— Academic Ableism by Jay T Dolmage

On the other hand, a critique of universal design would point out that there is no built-­in process for collecting feedback from users, thus no way to ensure that those who inhabit the designed space have an active role in its reconstruction. In these ways, usability and universal design ask for one another. Particularly in the context of the classroom, usability and universal design offer a philosophical and practical basis for the kind of teaching that might be truly responsive to all students, and that might allow all students to be responsible for the direction of pedagogy.

— Academic Ableism by Jay T Dolmage