It’s a challenge enough to manage one’s life with a mental disability, but it’s a whole other problem when someone is harassed for it. One student in Montana has been working diligently towards completing their PhD program under a senior advisor with tenure. However, after being diagnosed with autism, the student decided to inform their advisor about it, only to realize that it was the biggest mistake ever. The advisor began belittling the student in private and in public while also telling everyone they weren’t “capable of doing PhD-level work.” And the harassment just kept getting worse.
“Unfortunately, he seemed to believe being autistic means I’m intellectually disabled,” the student explained on Reddit. The Montana advisor denied them from working towards their PhD for an entire year, all the while insulting them for being autistic. On top of telling the student that any positive feedback was just “pity and lies,” he also withheld over $4,000 of the student’s stipend for himself and his personal research. It wasn’t until after the committee recommended that the student do research on their own that the old advisor took offense and fired them as a result.
The autistic PhD student wasn’t going to take this sitting down and tried their hardest to persuade the committee to keep them in the program. And while the faculty praised the student for their high-quality research, it refused to go against the advisor or take disciplinary action against him. “We’d rather use the semester of funding to hire new students to our own labs,” the committee remarked.
Now unable to fund their education without a stipend, the student is at their wits’ end, wondering whether they should seek legal recourse against their awful advisor. They put up with the harassment, the discrimination, and loss of stipend funds, but being fired from the PhD program could cause their future career prospects to go up in flames. And this is all because they disclosed their autism diagnosis.
Needless to say, many in the Reddit post’s comment section strongly suggest finding a lawyer to take up the case, as it could be next to impossible to face the faculty and tenured advisor alone. Hopefully, the Montana student has enough evidence to take the issue to court, as the advisor’s behavior is unacceptable and shouldn’t go unpunished.
