Autism as Academic Paradigm

[Guest guest]

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i41/41cowenautism.htm

BINGO! Good catch ! The article deserves wi-i-de distribution.

- Bill, dx AS; ...academic (student > teacher > dept.head > more)

What a classy piece of writing. A

very good article that is a keeper

Greg

dx AS at 53

[Guest guest]

By Tyler Cowen

Thinking back on history, maybe you've wondered how it was that American

colleges and universities could ever have contributed to racist discourse. But

Princeton and many other institutions kept out Jews, and " academic " defenses of

slavery, segregation, and eugenics were commonplace until broader social changes

rendered such views unacceptable.

The sad truth is that dehumanizing ideologies are still with us in the modern

university, although they take very different forms. Prime examples include the

unacceptable ways we sometimes talk and think about the autism spectrum.

A few years ago, L. Ganz, who teaches at the Harvard School of Public

Health, published an essay titled " Costs of Autism in the United States. "

Nowhere in the essay does he consider whether autistic people have brought

benefits to the human race. Can you imagine a comparable essay titled: " Costs of

Native Americans " ? Ganz might think that autism is strictly a disease, but he

never mentions or rebuts the fact that a great number of autistics reject this

view and find it insulting.

Bainbridge is a veterinary anatomist at the University of Cambridge. In

2008 he published a book with Harvard University Press, Beyond the Zonules of

Zinn: A Fantastic Journey Through Your Brain. In the book he claimed that

autistics were lacking in the quality of human alertness, and he compared their

cognitive faculties unfavorably with those of brain-damaged monkeys. Deborah R.

Barnbaum, a philosopher at Kent State University, wrote a book (ironically

titled The Ethics of Autism, Indiana University Press, 2008) pondering the

philosophical implications of the supposed fact that autistics cannot understand

the mental lives of other people; yet this result has not held up in experiments

and it also could be refuted by a few simple conversations with autistic people.

The point is not to focus blame on these particular individuals, as they have

soaked up common ideas, attitudes, and presuppositions from a broader setting.

It's quite possible that these writers are all " nice people " in the usual sense,

but still they have not developed any sense of revulsion or hesitancy at such

portraits of other human beings. The sorry truth is that until we are made very

consciously aware of the implications of our words, it is all too easy to slip

into bad habits and harmful rhetoric, even in politically correct 2009.

I've cited some of the more obvious examples, but the underlying biases are much

more deeply rooted. A lot of people at colleges are aware of dealing with autism

(and Asperger's syndrome; I will refer generally to the autism spectrum) in

their " special needs " programs. The more complex reality is that there is a lot

more autism in higher education than most of us realize. It's not just " special

needs " students but also our valedictorians, our faculty members, and yes

—sometimes —our administrators.

That last sentence is not some kind of cheap laugh line about the many

dysfunctional features of higher education. Autism is often described as a

disease or a plague, but when it comes to the American college or university,

autism is often a competitive advantage rather than a problem to be solved. One

reason American academe is so strong is because it mobilizes the strengths and

talents of people on the autistic spectrum so effectively. In spite of some of

the harmful rhetoric, the on-the-ground reality is that autistics have been very

good for colleges, and colleges have been very good for autistics.

The economist and Nobel laureate Vernon L. , a former colleague of mine, is

one of the best-known examples of a high achiever on the autism spectrum.

Vernon, in Discovery: A Memoir, attributes his extreme focus, his attention to

detail, and his scholarly persistence to his connections to the autism spectrum.

Borcherds, winner of the 1998 Fields Medal in mathematics, has been

diagnosed as having Asperger's. Temple Grandin, who teaches animal science at

Colorado State University, is a brilliant autistic woman whose ideas have

revolutionized how American slaughterhouses treat animals. There are very likely

many more examples, albeit unrecognized ones. Simon Baron-Cohen, a leading

autism researcher at the University of Cambridge, argues that autistic high

achievers are far more common than most people realize, most of all in

mathematics and engineering. He stresses systematizing behavior as an important

cognitive strength of autistics.

In spite of some of the common rhetoric, each year specialists are teaching us

more about the cognitive strengths of the autism spectrum. In the 1960s, it was

a common view that, except for a few savants, most autistic people were

intellectually disabled ( " mentally retarded " was the less than felicitous term),

and to some extent this stereotype persists today. But a growing body of work

pinpoints areas where autistics outperform nonautistics.

A partial list notes that autistics have, on average, superior pitch perception

and other musical abilities, they are better at noticing details in patterns,

they have better visual acuity, they are less likely to be fooled by optical

illusions, they are more likely to fit some canons of economic rationality, they

solve many puzzles at a much faster rate, and they are less likely to have false

memories of particular kinds. Autistics also have, to varying degrees, strong or

even extreme abilities to memorize, perform operations with codes and ciphers,

perform calculations in their head, or excel in many other specialized cognitive

tasks. The savants, while they are outliers, also reflect cognitive strengths

found in autistics more generally. A recent investigation found, with

conservative methods, that about one-third of autistics may have exceptional

skills or savantlike abilities.

Autistic people usually have a superior desire and talent for assembling and

ordering information. Especially when they are given appropriate access to

opportunities and materials, autistics live the ideal of self-education, often

to an extreme. In my new book, Create Your Own Economy, I refer to autistics as

the " infovores " of modern society and I argue that along many dimensions we as a

society are working hard to mimic their abilities at ordering and processing

information. Autism is a topic that anyone interested in education should be

reading and thinking about.

It turns out that the American university is an environment especially conducive

to autistics. Many autistics are disadvantaged or overwhelmed by processing

particular stimuli from the outside world and thus are subject to perceptual

overload as a result. For some autistics, that is debilitating, but for many

others it is either manageable or a problem they can work around. The result is

that many autistics prefer stable environments, the ability to choose their own

hours and work at home, and the ability to work on focused projects for long

periods of time.

Does that sound familiar? The modern college or university is often ideal or at

least relatively good at providing those kinds of environments. While there is

plenty of discrimination against autistics, most people in American universities

are so blind to the notion of high-achieving autistics that one prejudice

cancels out the other, to the benefit of many of the autistics in universities.

Autistics also tend to be extremely good at a subset of cognitive tasks and

markedly poor or impaired at others; they are the ultimate beneficiaries from

Adam 's notion of the division of labor. Academic specialization makes it

easier for such people to win fame.

I don't want to push you too much in the direction of stereotypes such as " the

absent-minded professor. " Some people fitting that profile may well be on the

autism spectrum, but the spectrum also includes beautiful women with charming

smiles, enthusiastic extroverts, people who cannot produce meaningful speech,

and people who make very clear and effective public speeches from memory alone.

Tony Attwood, an Australian psychologist with extensive diagnostic experience,

believes that acting is a profession well-represented on the autistic spectrum.

The point is not to convince you of any single profile of autistics or to

replace your old stereotypes with new ones. Rather, we keep on learning that the

diversity of autistics is greater than we used to think.

There is no doubt that many autistic people have very troubled lives and are

unable to move into positions of high achievement or even contend for them.

Problems, such as very obvious social atypicalities, acquired social anxiety, or

various perceptual hypersensitivities —found among many but by no means all

autistics —may hamper their ability to obtain ordinary jobs or rise in social

status.

Current prejudices are based on at least two mistakes. First, too often autism

is defined as a series of impairments or life failures, thereby ruling out high

achievers. It is more scientific and also more ethical to have a broader

definition of autism, based on differing and atypical methods for processing

information and other cognitive and biologically defined markers. That way we do

not label autistics as necessary failures, but rather we recognize a great

diversity of outcomes including successes.

Second, diagnosed autistics are very often those people who encounter major

problems in life. Most higher-status autistics don't ever show up for diagnosis

or intervention, and many of them have no great need for it or no real awareness

of it, or, even if they are having difficulties, they fear the stigma of a

diagnosis. Common samples of autistics, as you find studied in a typical

research paper, show many more problems, and many fewer successes, than is most

likely the case in a true population sample of autistics. In other words, there

is enormous selection bias. Research on autism is only starting to confront that

problem.

We're also learning that a lot of the stereotypes about autistics are false or

at least misleading. It's been suggested, for instance, that autistics don't

care much about other people, or that autistics lack genuine emotions or are

incapable of empathy. The more likely truth is that autistics and nonautistics

do not always understand each other very well. It's odd that the people who make

this charge so often, in the very act of doing so, fail to show much empathy for

autistics or to recognize their rich emotional lives. Even when the cognitive

capabilities of autistics are recognized —most commonly in the cases of savants

—it is too often accompanied by a clichéd and inaccurate picture of a cold,

robotic, or less than human personality.

The relevance of the autism spectrum for higher education isn't just about

particular individuals on the autistic spectrum. The very nature of higher

education shows how much we, often without knowing it, hold up autistic

cognitive profiles as a partial educational ideal. In " special needs " education,

there is plenty of effort to teach the skills of the nonautistic to the

autistic, but in the regular classroom we are often doing the opposite. I view

higher (and lower) education as teaching people to be more autistic in many of

their basic cognitive skills. Again, some key cognitive features of autism are

the ability, and desire, to process lots of information across widely different

scales, from tiny details to overarching structures; focus and the mental

ordering of that information; a relatively high degree of scientific

objectivity; and the presence of some highly specialized cognitive strengths,

even if they are accompanied by some areas of poor performance. To an educator a

lot of that list ought to sound pretty good.

Another way of putting it is to note that all students are special-needs

students requiring lots of help. The nonautistic students do not represent some

ideal point that everyone is striving to attain, but rather both autistic and

nonautistic students are trying to learn the specialized skills of the other

group, as well as perfecting their own skills.

When it comes to public and academic discourse, it's not just our understanding

of autism that is up for grabs. Human beings experience a variety of

neurodevelopmental paths, with ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder)

as another prominent example. We need to be careful about what we label as a

disorder. When it comes to ADHD, for instance, there is growing evidence that

ADHD individuals achieve very good outcomes by normal social standards. The

popular-culture stereotype is of an ADHD (often " ADD " ) person superficially

clicking from one channel or Web site to the next. An alternative vision is that

many ADHD individuals adapt and end up using their cognitive profile to propel

themselves from learning one piece of information to the next, and in fact end

up better educated and maybe better situated to deal with the social world as

well. Similarly, one study found that dyslexic people made better entrepreneurs

on average, because they are used to the idea of having to delegate some tasks

rather than trying to micromanage everything.

In many areas of human neurodiversity, including autism, we still don't know the

answers to many basic questions. There is still not even agreement on the basic

definitions of autism, Asperger's, and related concepts. In the meantime we are

applying lots of stereotypes and negative descriptions to autistics that we

would not dream of using to describe racial or ethnic groups. It's high time

that colleges and universities got out in the lead to fight these common

prejudices. The rhetoric coming out of higher education needs to match up to the

reality of higher education as a common avocation for autistic people.

We are still searching for appropriate metaphors and language to describe and

explain human neurodiversity. For instance, we've moved beyond viewing autism as

the result of " refrigerator mothers " —cold, distant —as was most visibly

suggested by Bruno Bettelheim in the 1960s. We're just starting to move beyond

defining it as a " series of impairments. " If we call autism a " disorder, " is

that being humane and offering sympathy and aid, or is it judgmental in a way

that stereotypes, lowers expectations, and ignores variation in outcomes?

But if it is not correct to speak of a disorder, what exactly is the sensible

language and what are the accompanying conceptual frames? The commonly heard

distinction between " high functioning " and " low functioning " ignores extreme

variations in the skills of the autistic individual, and it also seems to

classify a group of human beings as somehow unfit. When it comes to discourse on

the autism spectrum, we should be humane, respect human difference and

individuality, respect the need for possible assistance, and recognize the

diversity within the spectrum, and all that without assuming that nonautistic

ways of viewing the world are always the right ones.

The common public perception is that autism is about sick or diseased children,

and it is up to the academic community to help correct that picture. If we look

at the data, it seems easy to find lots of autistic children yet relatively

hard, at least by the standards of common public perception, to find a

commensurate number of autistic adults. For instance a typical figure suggests

that the United States has about 500,000 autistic children, for a prevalence in

the range of 1 in 150. That would mean that the United States also has 1.5

million autistic adults. (Those numbers are very rough approximations and still

being debated.)

My belief is that the United States does in fact have more than one million

autistic adults. But if there are so many autistic adults, the obvious question

is: Where are they? Who are they? Are they all locked up in institutions? It is

sometimes suggested that there must be a very recent " epidemic " of autism. But

the epidemiological measurements of autism prevalence —if we acknowledge

deliberate changes in diagnostic criteria, awareness, service availability,

case-finding methods, and so on over time —do not indicate large unexplained

increases. You could argue for a gradual increase in the rate of autism, as

existing evidence cannot rule out all changes (I think the rate is more likely

constant over time), but still the growth would be so incremental that, again, a

sensible estimate would be more than a million autistic adults in the United

States.

It's a little tricky to talk or write about the autistics who may work in your

institution. If you work at a college or university, there is a good chance you

are interacting with people on the autism spectrum on a very regular basis.

Maybe the reaction of the reader is to draw up a mental list of people in the

workplace and start applying various stereotypes to them. Maybe you'll be on the

lookout at the next dean's meeting for people who exhibit " autistic traits " and

then gossip about those perceptions to your friends.

That's human nature, but I'm suggesting an alternative tack. Embrace

individualism. Question your stereotypes. Maybe even look in the mirror. When

you're done, it's likely that you'll see far more talent, in far more unorthodox

varieties, than you expected.

Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at Mason University who blogs at

http://www.marginalrevolution.com and writes for The New York Times, Money, and

other publications. This essay is adapted from his new book from Dutton, Create

Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World.

[Guest guest]

Thanks for posting this ! I missed it when it was published in

July...here's the updated link for the entire article if anybody wants to see it

on the Chronicle

http://chronicle.com/article/Autism-as-Academic-Paradigm/47033/

Sharon- AS and fighting with my university this week for equal access to

information that I can process

>

> By Tyler Cowen

>

> Thinking back on history, maybe you've wondered how it was that American

colleges and universities could ever have contributed to racist discourse. But

Princeton and many other institutions kept out Jews, and " academic " defenses of

slavery, segregation, and eugenics were commonplace until broader social changes

rendered such views unacceptable.

[Guest guest]

Thanks for posting the update, Sharon. Sifting through academic related stuff

is like smelling an incredible aroma I cannot get enough of and such. It's

intoxicating and helps to keep things fresh for me. I was on the phone last

week with my graduate advisor when I was in grad school. He sent me a few

articles which he wrote recently. I was able to make the connections between

that articles and others he wrote years ago.

Always good to see articles as these on the Chronicle. Hidden disabilities with

students were issues that higher education administrators did not have the

necessary training to deal with and such. With continual cutbacks to higher

education, the challenges will become immensely greater for administrators and

faculty to work with students who have AS/ADHD/other challenges.

- AS-AD/HD and a former higher education administrator, who is a long shot

to ever be back in that environment.

> >

> > By Tyler Cowen

> >

> > Thinking back on history, maybe you've wondered how it was that American

colleges and universities could ever have contributed to racist discourse. But

Princeton and many other institutions kept out Jews, and " academic " defenses of

slavery, segregation, and eugenics were commonplace until broader social changes

rendered such views unacceptable.

>