Price reveals a stunning truth: academic standards serve a medical purpose. Requirements like rationality, participation, independence, and collegiality function not merely as educational benchmarks but as diagnostic tools. Failing to meet these standards marks a person as "unfit for life," not just unfit for school or unteachable. Academia thus transforms pedagogical judgments into medical ones, using classroom performance to determine who deserves to exist in intellectual spaces—and by extension, who belongs in society at all.

Academic Standards as Medical Judgements

- Pathologizing the Classroom
- Impacts on Faculty

The Consequences of Academic Standards for Personality

- Academic Standards as Medical Judgements
- The Consequences of Academic Standards for Personality

State University of New York at Binghamton

Higher education discriminates against mental disability, with a vested interest in removing people with academic disabilities from academia. This stems from the myth that people with divergent thinking are dangerous, resulting in strict standards of acceptable personality. The equation of medical and academic standards leads teachers to pathologize student personalities in the classroom, creating a secret population of neurodivergent minds who use "lore"—leveraging amusement at difference to mitigate distrust. Price applies Disability Studies (DS) to transform this dynamic.

Mad At School: Foreword (by Tobin Siebers)

Price, Margaret. 2011b. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Reference for: Mad At School by Margaret Price

- Transforming How We Understand Academic Thinking
- The Great Myth

Price's Purpose and Core Claim

The "Stunning Revelation": Standards and Consequences

Academia employs fictional personas as "lore" to mask its distrust of neurodivergent minds. Students and faculty are categorized into familiar stereotypes: the "eccentric teacher," the "absent-minded professor," or the "clueless undergraduate." These labels allow institutions to find difference amusing rather than threatening. However, this tolerance is conditional—once these disabled minds cease to entertain or cross boundaries of acceptability, they are swiftly dismissed from academic spaces.

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