While it has been heartening to read the recent thoughtful discussion of diversity in the Australian HE sector, it has been disappointing that few people mention disability. As a disabled postdoc working towards a world that is not just inclusive but welcoming, I respectfully request three changes in our conversation about diversity.
The first is to only make a claim to a diversity-focus when we truly mean diversity. To be clear, I am not against advocating for a specific group. I am working on a project called “finding Australia’s disabled authors,” so obviously do quite a bit of that myself. However, diversity is about all groups. And when a field says it is discussing diversity, but continually leaves disability out of the conversation, it disadvantages everyone. It is sometimes called being diversish or, as I like to say, it deletes the “d” from “diverse” – creating an Iverse – a place where there are individuals, but there is no community.
My second request is that our conversation extends from counting who is in the room, to considering who is locked out. Australian HE has had some recent firsts in disability inclusion.
In 2022 Rachel High became the first person with Down syndrome to graduate from an Australian university (Flinders University). Later that same year Graeme Innes Am became the first who identifies as a person with a disability to be appointed as Chancellor (Central Queensland University). These are excellent achievements that deserve much more recognition than they have received so far.
Perhaps that recognition has not been forthcoming because it also requires acknowledging that these are exceptions when they should be typical of a country where one in five people are disabled. We currently create and maintain a HE system that requires disabled people to scale buildings and smash windows, while everyone else sits in the room discussing “diversity.”
My third request is that we all expect more of each other than small changes and easy actions. I recognise that doing something simple could be better than doing nothing, and that doing something simple could be a first step to doing something more difficult. Equally though, doing something simple can be an excuse for refusing to do more. Indeed, it frames diversity as a quest. Instead of being a strength we share, diversity becomes a set of problems of ever-increasing difficulty. And in that framing, disabled people are always the most difficult problem. We are always the group that everyone promises they will include one day, after they’ve included all the easy groups. They say they need to begin with simple actions, and decades later, they are still only taking the same simple actions. There is no avoiding the fact that true diversity requires everyone’s effort.
I make these requests not only because I am acutely aware of the precarity of my own inclusion in HE as a disabled academic, and because disabled people are members of every minoritised group, and because I agree with so many writers on this topic that differences should be acknowledged, respected, and celebrated. But I also make them because HE is so often tasked with demonstrating diversity for the community in both implicit and explicit ways. We cannot claim such expertise when disability is excluded from our diversity discussions.
Dr Amanda Tink is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of South Australia.The views expressed are her own.
