J. Peters - University on Watch

University on Watch was written over a period of ten years following my crisis while attending New London University from 2008 to 2018. Blogging offers a powerful means and invent more meaningful ways of interpreting my own experience at New London University. As a result, my story takes on a deeper and more nuanced reflection of my experience in college.

I am a rhetoric scholar and a person with lived experience with schizophrenia. I am also a prosumer. My identity aside, the status of disability studies and narratives, memoirs, and stories that aim to reclaim the writers lost authorial voice are in demand. These stories offer catharsisupon reflection, after writing this novella, I am still not sure how to feel about my chosen path to healing through writing. Perhaps I should say I am privileged to have been given the opportunity to find catharsis and tell my story in a genuine way without privileging the reader. Other writers dont have the same opportunity.

My story is shocking. My story is also very frank. I hold nothing back. This novella, University on Watch, is a vivid account of my struggle with the onset of my mental health disorder in college. This book offers a new examination of how anosognosia impacts young adults in an academic setting. Anosognosia means that the afflicted person does not recognize or understand the nature of his or her illness. With this said, I was still privileged, and without the help and support I did receive, this book might never have been written.

During the crisis itself, I also wrote a paper called Contesting Admission. The paper was designed to alter the events at the university in 2008 at the very root, where words and power intersect in the system of signification we call the English language. For the reader to truly capture the altered realities and my perception at the time of the crisis in the academy, this book will quote unedited passages from Contesting Admission to both highlight and cast a different lens on the crisis that unfolded in Liberty, New York.

Contesting Admission was written in the style of Michel Foucault, citing incidents in my life based on quotations from primary documents (e.g., court orders, lists from the New London English department, and publications in the community that followed my story at the time). The paper was my attempt to make sense of the world around me as it became more and more distorted and irrational.

The progression of my symptoms took place over a six-month period after the admission decision, largely during the spring semester of 2008. Contesting Admission ultimately achieved its intent. I identified a concern in the humanities. While I initially set out to identify what it was that had blocked my admission to the department, a different tremendous concern was eventually identifiedthe state of my mental status, which ultimately led to my admission to the hospital.

In the paper, I begin by talking about madness and day-to-day observations of my life in Liberty. Again, this signals the irony of the state of my mental status, and the fact I was being observed by the department on the level of behavior. As stated in an email from the dean, I was assessed for safety to continue as a student. I go on to discuss hygiene, which was an issue also noted by the dean of students. However, the issue I discussed was how hygiene hindered me. Instead of recognizing my own deficit in self-care, which at that point was a clinically significant issue that again signals my mental status at that time.

When the passages Empire through the Second American Revolution were written, a friend was writing a paper on my arrest for loitering. While it is obvious, I understood this arrest to be a part of my own political revolution. This is when I discovered the word meta-power, a word I believed I had recently invented. This was when the voices truly became disturbing and spoke to me. Shortly after I began hearing voices, I was admitted to the hospital for ongoing psychiatric care.

During this hospitalization, my illness was diagnosed by a team of clinicians at Liberty General Hospital. Ultimately, the paper Contesting Admission was written from the point of onset to hospitalization. I showed this paper to very few people at the time and made clear that the paper was intended to overturn the admission decision. However, they commented very little on its meaning and intent and provided little feedback. While writing can be therapeutic, it always depends on what the writing is intended to achieve. In the end, the paper serves to highlight what happens when people keep pressing forward without hope of salvation.

Meta-power is a word that I use often in the paper. It signifies the power of language and those who wield it (such as Dr. H and the English department chair) to make decisions that change the world, from globalization down to the day-to-day operations of English departments. Over the course of my last days in the community, I wrote day and night for months, trying to identify the root of power that discontinued my path to graduate school in English and, ultimately, the mysteries embedded within the language.