I tell myself I’m going to be kind today. I tell myself I’m going to laugh.
I’ve been disabled all my life. I’ve been treated poorly by school teachers, children, adults, professors, taxi drivers, college administrators, airline personnel—its a long list.
I laugh. I do it a lot. I make up names for my ableist oppressors.
Charles Dickens ain’t got nothin’ on this baby.
College faculty are (to my mind) like those lobsters you see in restaurant tanks. Almost all of them are ableists…
There are of course many kinds of professors. In the faculty senate you’ll meet the following Moliere-esque figures:
The “Tartuffe” is an administrator, usually a dean or provost who will tell you with affected gestures that he, she, they, what have you, cares a great deal about blah blah blah but never helps out.
The “Harpagon” is also an administrator, but he, she, they, can also be a faculty member. The Harpagon is driven by rhetorics of cheapness but he, she, they, generally drives a nice car.
Statue du Commandeur: a rigid, punctilious, puritanical type—“this is the way we’ve always done it. If we changed things for you, we’d have to change things for everybody. Yes, it certainly must be hard…” See:
The Geronte: when his son is kidnapped he says: "Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?” (What in the deuce did he want to go on that galley for?” In other words, he brought this upon himself. “Really, shouldn’t you try something easier? I could have told you.”
“I am, I fear, Inclined to be unfashionably sincere."
–Moliere
Planet of the Blind 
Ableism seems so efficient that the goal for most “success”-minded people generally becomes to seek a suitably opaque work-around to anything else.
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