The Medicalization of Misspelling: DSM and the Management of Life

Abstract

Some years ago when I was talking with a university president, the conversation turned to students who do poorly in foreign language courses. “We’re just going to have to declare it a learning disorder,” he said, and not being bashful about the use of power, he meant his words. He seemed to think declaring a disorder was as straightforward as designating a state flower. In contrast to my interlocutor, the provost, later president, of Boston University (BU), Jon Westling, stated in a speech in 1995, “We need to be cautious in applying the label, ‘learning disabled.’ Finding a subject difficult is not, in itself, evidence of a disability.” A year later BU was sued by a group of learning-disabled (LD) and other students alleging that university policy and practice, including the enforcement of foreign language requirements, violated the Americans with Disabilities Act and theMassachusetts constitution. In 1997 and 1998 Federal District Judge Patti Saris issued the Guckenberger v. Boston University decision, which reproached President Westling for his “reliance on discriminatory stereotypes” of LD students, invalidated a number of BU’s efforts to tighten up the certification of learning disabilities, but ultimately upheld BU’s decision not to allow substitutions for required foreign language coursework—upheld it because it was clearly based on “reasoned deliberation” and a principled vision of the importance of foreign language study to a liberal Acad. Quest. (2015) 28:322–333 DOI 10.1007/s12129-015-9511-2