A Light in the Tower: A New Reckoning with Mental Health in Higher Education

Feb 26, 2026

A conversation about making higher education both rigorous and radically supportive of mental health. Topics include replacing exclusionary practices with accessible teaching, distinguishing “good-hard” from “bad-hard” work, and easing pathways to disability accommodations. They also explore how contingent labor, masking, and gender bias in diagnosis fuel campus anxiety and burnout.

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INSIGHT

Pandemic Revealed Preexisting Campus Weaknesses

A Light in the Tower links pre-pandemic and post-pandemic mental health issues to reveal longstanding institutional weaknesses.
Dr. Katie Rose Guest Pryal argues COVID exposed problems that existed for decades in how higher ed handles mental disability and neurodiversity.

INSIGHT

Words Shape Whether People Seek Help

Language shapes treatment: how campuses talk about mental health determines whether people seek help or hide.
Pryal prefers the term mental disability to capture psychiatric, developmental, and acquired cognitive differences and reduce stigma.

ANECDOTE

Faculty Lounge Jokes Normalize Ableist Language

Colleagues casually use diagnostic labels as metaphors, e.g., saying a dean is "so bipolar," which normalizes ableist language.
Pryal recounts hearing bipolar and OCD used jokingly in faculty spaces and warns it perpetuates stigma.

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A Light in the Tower argues that excellent education and radical support for mental health struggles can coexist, and provides detailed advice for how to do so. Dr. Katie Rose Guest Pryal debunks claims that supporting student mental health harms educational rigor (coining the term “rigor angst” to discuss the fear that rigor is declining). She outlines actionable steps professors and administrators can take, including abandoning ableist and exclusionary campus culture; replacing “bad-hard” work that creates unnecessary logistical difficulties for students in favor of “good-hard” work that challenges them intellectually; providing an easy path to disability accommodations; and teaching accessibly for neurodivergent students.

Dr. Pryal examines the anxiety that plagues campuses as a result of exploited and overworked contingent faculty and students, the systemic and institutional burnout that affects higher education at every level, and the market-driven culture of toxic overwork. Addressing the stigma that haunts mental disability on campus, the ableism that hounds our teaching, and the cascade of mental health struggles that far too many faculty and students face, Dr. Pryal provides straightforward solutions to complex challenges.

Our guest is: Dr. Katie Rose Guest Pryal, who is an author, neurodiversity expert, and adjunct professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of A Light in the Tower, and other works including the award-winning Even If You’re Broken: Bodies, Boundaries, and Mental Health.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and creator of the Academic Life podcast.

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