Letter to President E. Gordon Gee

On October 12, 2008, Autism Speaks held a walk on the Ohio State University campus, and President Gee presided as the honorary chair. During his speech, Gee claimed, "It [autism] should not exist." A letter to Gee, written by an OSU student with Asperger's, follows.

12 November 2008

E. Gordon Gee, President
205 Bricker Hall
190 North Oval Mall
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH 43210

Dear President Gee:

I am writing in regards to statements made at the Autism Speaks walk held on campus this past October 12. My name is Melanie Yergeau, and I am a second-year Ph.D. student in English. My area of focus is disability studies, and I have Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism.

Ohio State has a small but burgeoning community of autistic students, and many of us were dismayed at your call to “cure” autism during the event on October 12. Though several autistics from our campus group were in attendance at the rally, I was not. As with many others on the autism spectrum, I do not feel that Autism Speaks speaks for autistic individuals. I was, however, saddened by The Lantern’s emphasis on one of your remarks at the rally, during which you claimed, “It [autism] should not exist.” Many—and I would argue most—autistics do not want to be cured. Both high- and low-functioning individuals on the spectrum understand autism as their unique way of perceiving the world (e.g., Amanda Baggs, D.J. Savarese). Autism is a part of who I am: remove the autism and you remove me.

I have waited a month to send this letter because, I admit, I am so very close to this subject. However, a non-autistic Master’s student in social work suggested that you might not realize that autistics do attend Ohio State, that more of us enter the university everyday. And in further contemplating this, I realized that perhaps you have been thrown into this autism debate without realizing that it is, indeed, a debate.

Until very recently, I have felt incredibly welcome at Ohio State—due to the interdisciplinary work of the Disability Studies Program and the Department of English, the Office of Disability Services, and the programs for high-functioning/Asperger’s adults at the Nisonger Center. I would urge you, as you continue in your autism advocacy, to consider what cure means to autistic individuals themselves, to familiarize yourself with organizations that actually appoint autistic individuals to their executive boards (e.g., the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, or the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership). In this regard, I find it important to note that none of the leadership or board positions of Autism Speaks are occupied by autistics: Autism Speaks speaks about autistics rather than for or with autistics.

As I read articles and listen to reports of the rally from my saddened autistic friends, I’ve noticed a trend in representation at Autism Speaks rallies like the one on October 12, 2008: autistics themselves have no voice. Any conversation that determines the fate of autism, I would argue, must consider the opinions, voices (however literally or metaphorically), and experiences of those on the autism spectrum. Although Autism Speaks admirably aims to help families attain necessary medical services, their cure-and-epidemic rhetoric frequently denies autistic individuals a most fundamental right—that of their personhood.

I have written this letter to you personally because I would like to think that the president of the university I attend might not refer to autistics as pitiable people in need of cures and able-bodied heroes, but rather as full and contributing members of the university community. Only when we acknowledge that the conversation on autism must, of necessity, include autistics can we begin to help all those affected by autism to lead productive and fulfilling lives. It is my hope that you might not only speak as a university president on issues of autism, but as a role model for those within the autistic community.

Sincerely,

Melanie Yergeau
Department of English
421 Denney Hall
164 W. 17th Ave
Columbus, OH 43210
yergeau.1@osu.edu

CC: Brenda Brueggemann, Coordinator of the Disability Studies Program, Department of English

Kolb, ed.: The Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam

The Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam

Edited by Jack Kolb

Hallam is best remembered as the subject of what is, certainly, the most personal, and one of the most moving, elegies in English literature, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam—a poem that commemorates and celebrates the estimable qualities of a gifted young man who died prematurely in 1833, at age twenty-two, while traveling with his father in Europe, and whose personality and character, ironically enough, were to be persistently and increasingly obscured and distorted in the century following his death by the peculiar circumstances in which his literary “remains” were first published, and by the injudicious expurgations made by Hallam Tennyson in the account of the Hallam-Tennyson relationship in the memoir he wrote of his father.

In this scholarly edition of all known surviving letters and fragments by and to Hallam, we are able to see for the first time, and to see whole and plain, the golden boy who occupied so important a place both in the affection and admiration of his friends and at the center of the famous coterie of “Cambridge Apostles”—a group that, to be sure, was in part a mutual admiration society, but one that also epitomized the literary, intellectual, and political interests and aspirations of the generation that, about 1830, was beginning to come into its own.

Hallam, the son of the eminent historian Henry Hallam, was born in 1811, and was the author of a volume of creditable poetry and of numerous essays and reviews. His letters chronicle his schooling at Eton and Cambridge, a romantic season spent in Italy, a spiritual crisis, the course of his friendship with Tennyson, his engagement to Emily Tennyson, his apprenticeship in a law office, and a burgeoning career as a journalist. They provide, in addition, revealing and important information, otherwise unobtainable, on the early lives and opinions of Hallam’s friends, many of who rose to positions of considerable prominence and influence in Victorian life and society. We are brought into close contact, for example, with the whole Tennyson family during those difficult years when a great poet was emerging fro a desperately unhappy domestic milieu in the rectory at Somersby in the wilds and wolds of Lincolnshire. And we encounter in the letters to and from Gladstone the political acumen that was to result eventually in his election four times as prime minister of England—Gladstone, who was to adore Hallam throughout his whole life, and who said of his letters that they recount “ the history of his mind . . . so remarkable as composed of a series of the most keen and thrilling emotions” and with a “power and habit of setting it forth . . . not less conspicuous.”

Hallam’s correspondence represented a serious (in all the Victorian senses of the word) preoccupation throughout the whole of his short life. Letters were the sustenance, sometimes the very embodiment, of the relationship crucial to him. Indeed, separated as he and Emily Tennyson were during most of their engagement, their letters were their relationship. To both his fiancée and his friends, Hallam was to testify repeatedly and warmly to the emotional restoration, the recovery of spirits, that their letters brought—letters that came like “the gentle touch of the renovating diurnal light” to “one long imprisoned in darkness.”

Professor Kolb provides extensive annotation for the benefit of the general scholar as well as the specialist. His edition will prove useful to the historian as well as to the literary critic, for it incorporates a substantial number of extracts from the correspondence of Hallam’s contemporaries. More than two-thirds of the material it prints has not heretofore been published in any form, and many of the published texts it reprints are virtually inaccessible today.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org

Bradley, ed: The Letters of John Ruskin to Lord and Lady Mount-Temple

The Letters of John Ruskin to Lord and Lady Mount-Temple

Edited and with an Introduction by John Lewis Bradley

The frantic, indeed psychotic obsession of John Ruskin for a young girl named Rose La Touche constitutes probably the most terrible (and, unfortunately, protracted, and, in the end, tragic) period in the life of that Victorian genius.

In recent years, the publication of previously suppressed documents relating to the affair, which ended with Rose’s death in a kind of religious insanity and which contributed decisively to the madness in which Ruskin spent his last dozen or more years, has inevitably made the story one of the central points in Ruskin biography, not only because it has a quite horrid fascination of its own, but also because it throws much light on Ruskin’s complex and desperately unhappy personality.

These letters are documents of unusual value for the fresh light they shed on a crucial phase of Ruskin’s life and for the incidental illustrations they offer of the breadth of his intellectual interests and the virtually obsessive nature of his work in many fields. Furthermore, unlike many similar collections, this one constitutes a connected drama and a coherent psychological narrative.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org