When “Support” Means Standing Back: What Higher Ed Still Doesn’t Understand About Autistic Students
Autistic students are often framed as recipients of support — individuals to be accommodated, managed or helped. But on college campuses across the country, something quieter is happening.
We’re not waiting to be included.
We’re building what inclusion actually looks like.
In a recent opinion piece for Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, Brad Cox, Brett Nachman, Karly Isaacson and Catherine T. McDermott offer a clear and timely message: colleges don’t need to invent autistic community. It already exists — peer-led, care-driven and often invisible to the very systems that claim to serve us.
Read their full article here. Then ask: If autistic students are already building belonging, why are institutions still designing for us, instead of with us?
Support Doesn’t Start With Services
Most campus disability offices still operate from a medicalized playbook: determine the diagnosis, apply the accommodation, document the adjustment. It’s efficient. It’s compliant. But it’s not community.
Autistic students are creating what institutional structures rarely offer:
- Peer spaces rooted in shared neurotype, not just shared need
- Mutual support that doesn’t require disclosure or paperwork
- Relief from masking, not pressure to perform neurotypical norms
These efforts aren’t always official. But they’re essential. They don’t just meet needs. They name them. And they treat autistic life as valid — not in spite of difference, but through it.
Institutions Are Late to a Conversation Already in Progress
The authors of the Diverse piece aren’t autistic, and they don’t pretend to be. What they do — and do well — is point to where leadership is already happening. They cite autistic-led mentorship programs. They acknowledge the emotional labor students are doing behind the scenes. They ask colleges to stop overlooking what’s already working just because it didn’t come from a grant-funded initiative.
That kind of amplification matters. Especially in spaces where autistic insight is still seen as optional, or “nice to have,” instead of foundational.
Real Inclusion Means Real Redistribution
It’s easy to celebrate neurodiversity during awareness weeks. It’s harder to shift funding, authorship and governance.
If colleges want to support autistic students, they need to stop designing programs in our absence. That doesn’t mean every initiative must be led by autistic people — but it does mean nothing about us should be built without our input, and preferably, our co-leadership.
Because inclusion that doesn’t move power isn’t inclusion. It’s public relations.
The Future Is Already Here
Autistic students are already organizing. Already mentoring. Already shaping what access actually feels like. The question isn’t whether colleges will catch up. The question is whether they’ll do it before burning out the very students who are building what the institution forgot to imagine.
We don’t need more checklists.
We need commitment.
Not just to listening — but to following.
And not just to programs — but to people.