Review from Chronicle of Higher Education

By Jennifer K. Ruark

Different drummers: one student rocks back and forth vigorously in anthropology class, staring off into space. One brings a map of Hawaii to physics class and studies it intently every day. Another gets up from her library chair every five minutes to twirl clockwise three times.

They are among the people described in the introduction to Aquamarine Blue 5: Personal Stories of College Students With Autism. The autobiographical accounts were collected by Dawn Prince-Hughes, an adjunct professor of anthropology at Western Washington University, who has a high functioning form of autism, Asperger’s syndrome, herself.

A primate researcher who won acclaim for her book Gorillas Among Us. A Primate Ethnographer’s Book of Days (University of Arizona Press, 2001), Ms. Prince-Hughes’s interest in autism is professional as well as personal. There is an emerging “autistic culture,” she argues, which has become possible only in. the age of the Internet. Online chat groups forge connections among people who avoid direct eye contact and have trouble following social cues.

Many autistic people also are acutely aware of sounds or textures-the buzzing of fluorescent lights, the porousness of a wooden desk-that other people don’t even notice. They may seem to adhere slavishly to meaningless routines and rituals. With traits like those, autistic students are too often seen as “detriments to the academy’s goals: producing uniform students who learn well within a particular instructional range, freeing professors to engage in research which in turn brings the academy revenue and prestige,” writes Ms. Prince-Hughes. Actually, she argues, at least some autistic traits-high intelligence, obsessive interests, and ability to focus-can be the key to academic success.

Take “Susan,” whose essay inspired the book’s title. As part of her autism, she experiences syesthesia, or cross-sensory perception, which in her case means seeing music, along with letters and numbers, in particular colors. “My green letters are ‘G,’‘H,’‘L,’‘P,’‘W,’ she writes. Though as a child she was diagnosed with an unidentified learning disability, her synesthesia helps her memorize words, which comes in handy now that she is working toward a Ph.D. in linguistics.

What’s more, “autistic students don’t just disappear when they graduate,” Ms. Prince-Hughes says in an e-mail interview. “They are many times hired as faculty.” She found the contributors to her book from an online chat group of students and professors with autism. Some chose to use pen names, for fear that identifying themselves as, autistic would hurt their chances in an already tight job market.

She decided not to edit the essays, arguing that way they are written reflects autistic people and their lives. Autistic people “constantly see divergent possibilities (and at a staggeringly fast pace), and our word selection and sentence structures often reflect this,” she writes. “I have heard many autistic people say that written English is their first language,” she says, “and spoken English their second.”

The book includes a list of common challenges for autistic students and what universities can do about them. Professors and administrators are bound to come into contact with autistic people eventually, says Ms. Prince-Hughes, and should read as much material written by such people as they can.

“Historically, we have seen marginalized groups go through a process by which other, non marginalized people speak for them until they finally begin to speak for themselves,” she adds. For autistic people, “this is finally happening.”

?There’s been an amazing, gratifying amount of interest in Ms. Prince-Hughes’s book, says Richard Gilbert—publicity manager at Ohio University Press. So much so in fact, that she has won a six-figure advance from Harmony Books, a division of Random House, for a memoir, to be published in 2004 as Songs of the Gorilla Nation.

The memoir will be an expansion of the anthropologist’s own essay in Aquamarine Blue 5, which describes how she dropped out of high school and was briefly homeless before enrolling in an animal-sciences program that involved, volunteer research at a zoo “working with gorillas had an enormous calming effect on me helping her to overcome aspects of her autism,” she writes.

“Staring—like normal people in our culture consider polite in conversation—is rude and threatening to nonhuman primates,” she writes. “Their social subtleties and calm demeanor allowed me to relax and really watch what they were doing...I saw social cause and effect for the first time.”

Nine publishers were interested in the memoir, and Random House made a pre-emptive offer to avoid a bidding war. “I very much liked the Harmony team,” says Ms. Prince-Hughes. “Several of them told me that they cried when they read the manuscript, and they all hugged me at the end of the meeting. You can’t beat that.”

She has often met people who tell her that she doesn’t seem autistic. “I have a love/hate relationship with that statement,” she says. “I am pleased that they are comfortable with me, and that they see that 1 am a caring, emotional person.... On the other hand, I and virtually all of the autistic people I know-are proud of who they are and are very happy that they are able to think differently.”

Chronicle of Higher Education