Exclusionary Logics: Constructing Disability and Disadvantaging Disabled Academics in the Neoliberal University

Abstract

Contemporary academia features managerialism and neoliberal thinking, consequent of an increasingly dominant market logic. This article draws on interviews with disabled academics, line managers, human resources professionals, estates staff, health and safety staff, and trade union representatives, alongside university policy documents, to discuss the impact of this logic on the experiences of disabled academics. Understandings of disability across professional groups were divorced from institutional rhetoric of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, aligning more clearly with market logic, manifest in performance management and idealised notions of academic work. Unlike students, disabled academics are required to navigate hostile policies and procedures. Their diagnoses are used in points of dispute relating to performance, or as an obstruction to dismissal tolerated out of legal obligation. This article illustrates the need for a change in university institutional logics to undo the damaging limitations of following market models of education.