In the ninth grade, I scored 21.5 out of 40 in my first-term geometry exams. Not because I was unprepared, or nervous. But due to my dexterity issues, I couldn’t use my geometry instruments quickly enough to finish the paper on time. That number on my report card marked the first moment when disability appeared to me as an academic liability — rather than a physical fact.

The score scared my parents, too. They decided that perhaps, it was time for me to get formally assessed for a physical disability. After the assessment, I received a disability certificate that entitled me to extra time. Accommodation was now a part of my education. As an undergraduate student at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, I had accommodations like computer-based exams, scribes, extra time, alternate assignments, e-copies of textbooks, and a student helping me with notes. Requests were processed without explanation or delay. During my master’s degree at another well-regarded institution, the same request resulted in a sequence of referrals which moved me from faculty to administration to the library. Access existed, but it was distant and procedural; largely driven by the apathy of a bureaucratised process.

Jay Timothy Dolmage’s “Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education” provided me with a vocabulary for this experience. Reading the book as a student with a physical disability in India, I found the book’s arguments to be less like a revelation, and more like a naming of what I had already experienced — but couldn’t fully articulate. Writing from lived experiences dealing with American universities, Dolmage argues that higher education is structured around exclusion, rather than incidentally marred by it. Disability, he writes, “has always been constructed as the inverse or opposite of higher education.” And the university depends on this inversion to sustain itself as a space of merit, distinction, and ranking.

The inherent ableism of disability support in higher education

Dolmage’s argument isn’t that universities fail to support students with disabilities. It is that they support them in ways that preserve hierarchy. Institutions value speed, independence, and polish. In this context, disability becomes legible only as a deviation. As he puts it, higher education continues to “sort the population by a medicalised and legalistic definition of ‘ability’ as effectively now as it ever has.”

The process of getting accommodation sits at the centre of this sorting. 

It is structured around compliance rather than access. Students must obtain medical documentation validating their disability, submit to verification by authority, and negotiate its application for every subject with each professor. One student describes this process to Dolmage as resembling the strategy game, "Battleship," — “You throw your diagnosis over, and hope that it will land on something that will actually help you.” 

The metaphor matters, even in an Indian context. Because it captures uncertainty and also reflects a deeper asymmetry: institutions understand the system they have put in place, but students must guess their way through it. 

This uncertainty is not accidental. It produces what disability scholar Stephen Kuusisto, quoted by Dolmage, calls “gestural violence.” The experience of being treated as an inconvenience while appearing to be accommodated. Like you are being told, “if you were easier to deal with, this would not be necessary.”

In addition to lived experiences, Dolmage also shares statistics about students in higher education with disabilities. He treats these figures as institutional outcomes rather than measures of individual limitation. In the United States, 13 percent of adults aged 25 and older with disabilities hold a bachelor’s degree, compared to 31 percent of adults without disabilities. Nearly two-thirds of students with disabilities who enroll in US universities do not complete their degrees within six years, and those who do, carry up to 60 percent more debt. 

Data from India shows a comparable result: according to India’s 2011 census, only 8.5 percent of people with disabilities have completed their graduation. This, when the national average is much higher. Dolmage links this pattern to how universities define and regulate “ability” through medical and legal categories which  restrict access to credentials, employment, and formal knowledge. Despite having policies in place for students with disabilities, a lack of infrastructure, insensitive staff, and improper implementation creates barriers for them. This forces them to bear the hostile conditions of the university, or leave the institution. 

The disability support systems in universities are not designed taking people with disabilities into account. They are designed for the “ideal student.” My persistence, and awareness of my rights as a student, allowed me to eventually secure accommodations in the university where I was doing my Master’s. But that persistence itself is a form of labour. For many students, the process of persisting in specific situations is too opaque, too slow, or in some cases, too exposing to navigate.  

For those who persist, accommodation becomes a sustained lesson in self-management. Dolmage notes that disability only takes on institutional reality once it is documented and approved. Until then, it is treated as fiction or excess. This produces a shallow visibility: disability is recognised only when it can be controlled.

Defeat devices, procedures and systemic challenges

Dolmage describes many of these arrangements as “defeat devices.” Borrowing the term from the Volkswagen emissions scandal, he uses the phrase to describe measures which comply with regulations, while preserving harm. In academic settings, “defeat devices” include perfunctory accommodation letters, and syllabus statements that redirect responsibility elsewhere. These “devices” allow institutions to pass inspections without significantly altering how teaching and assessment are organised.

In the Indian higher education context of 2026, these “defeat devices” are not exceptional but embedded within compliance-heavy frameworks. Policies such as the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act (2016) mandate accessibility, but implementation is mediated through documentation, certification, and institutional discretion. The result is a system where inclusion exists formally, but access remains negotiated. The expansion of DEI discourse in Indian universities — especially post-pandemic — has increased the visibility of accessibility concerns. Yet, much of this progress remains procedural, rather than structural. 

Looking at accommodations in the workplace

This logic is familiar beyond the classroom. Accessibility policies at the workplace exist, but disclosure remains risky. Dolmage’s insight is not that universities cause discrimination at work, but that they train people to expect it. In this context, the concept of Universal Design discussed in the book offers a partial counterpoint. Designing courses and systems for varied bodies and minds from the outset reduces reliance on individual accommodation. During the pandemic, many institutions adopted practices — flexible deadlines, asynchronous participation — that aligned with this approach. Dolmage refers to this as the “curb cut effect”: access designed for one group often benefitting many others.

He is careful, however, not to overstate its promise. Universal Design, he warns, is readily absorbed into the same systems it is meant to challenge. When it becomes a checklist rather than a redistribution of resources and authority, it functions as another “defeat device.” 

Changing institutions from within 

The book has limits. Dolmage is more precise in diagnosing institutional behaviour than in outlining routes for change. His framework is grounded in the context of American higher education, where legal enforcement and availability of resources differ significantly from systems like in India’s. Here, the challenge is not only that accommodation preserves hierarchy, but that it is often inconsistently available. This raises a question his work doesn’t fully address: what does academic ableism look like in contexts where exclusion is not only structural, but also infrastructural? 

What the book does well is insist on taking institutional processes seriously. Accommodation, in Dolmage’s account, is not a benevolent add-on. It is a site where authority is exercised and belonging is negotiated. My own experience of being passed from office to office was not administrative inefficiency. It was the system functioning as designed. For organisations interested in inclusion, “Academic Ableism” reframes the problem.

The issue is not simply how to create accessible workplaces, but how to recognise what employees have already learned about requesting access. If education teaches that accommodation is slow, discretionary, and self-exposing, those lessons don’t end at graduation. For me, the value of “Academic Ableism” lies not in offering solutions, but in making it impossible to misrecognise these experiences as isolated or accidental.