The Woody Brown Saga Required A Number Of Institutional Failures
This is a pretty bad sign
As soon as the novel Upward Bound came out a few weeks ago, two things happened: It became a runaway hit — now a New York Times bestseller — and a bunch of critics loudly wondered whether it was really written by its ostensible author, Woody Brown.
In case you haven’t heard about this controversy yet, Woody Brown is a 28-year-old man with severe autism. He suffers from echolalia, or the involuntary recitation of words or phrases, and his utterances are often drawn from the children’s programming he has a fixation with. He employs a “media cart” with multiple screens playing this sort of content to keep him calm.
Well, it’s not that he employs the media cart. That’s the thing: It’s his mother, Mary Brown, who is his caretaker. Brown communicates with her by pointing at a letter board using a technique called the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM).
This will all sound familiar if you’ve heard of facilitated communication, or FC. FC is a broader set of practices that purportedly allow severely disabled people to communicate via the use of keyboards or letter boards, usually with the help of a caretaker who holds their arm steady. This practice was propelled along by an undeniably seductive idea: that a bunch of people who had been written off as incapable of communication due to their disabilities in fact had rich inner lives that could be unlocked by the proper caretaker wielding the proper technique. There was a surge of media attention, a surge in demand for FC training, and a sudden uptick in the number of severely disabled nonverbal people who were now communicating — sometimes in remarkably sophisticated ways — thanks to FC.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t real. Debunked isn’t a strong enough word for FC — disgraced might be a better fit. The technique appears, in many cases, to be driven by a Ouija board type of effect in which it is actually the facilitator who produces the words attributed to the nonverbal person in question. At the peak of FC, some of the words that were produced were very consequential. There were false sexual allegations. There was an unbelievable scandal involving a “consensual” relationship between a professor and disability activist named Anna Stubblefield and a nonverbal young man. Rigorous trials have shown, rather conclusively, that FC does not work as advertised.
Woody and Mary’s method, RPM, is basically just FC. It has not been rigorously evaluated. When I reached out to Soma Mukhopadhyay, the technique’s founder — and the woman Mary Brown credits with unlocking Woody’s apparently enormous potential — she sent me a few papers that didn’t come close to demonstrating what needs demonstrating: that RPM generates text that originated with the disabled person, not their facilitator. (I mentioned this in a premium episode of Blocked and Reported we produced on this controversy.)
RPM has taken Mary and Woody on a remarkable ride. His communicative potential unlocked — and with Mom at his side facilitating his communication — he allegedly got an undergraduate degree at UCLA, he allegedly followed it up with an MFA in creative writing at Columbia, and he allegedly wrote Upward Bound.
I say “allegedly” because no one knows if he actually accomplished any of these things. That’s what’s so remarkable about this story — how long it’s been going on with so little pushback from anyone who could have, well, pushed back. The Woody Brown controversy didn’t emerge ex nihilo. Rather, there’s a lot of history and context here, and that history and context should cause any reasonable observer to default to the explanation that it’s Mary, not Woody, doing the communicating here. (It doesn’t help matters that you can watch videos of Woody “spelling” that rather clearly demonstrate he is not, in fact, spelling the words Mary is attributing to him, as Jill Bearup and others have demonstrated.)
Daniel Engber, who wrote the definitive Stubblefield story for The New York Times Magazine all the way back in 2015, has done more investigation into Upward Bound than any other journalist. In his Atlantic article, he mentioned “the phalanx of established authors who have mentored Brown and endorsed his work”:
Those who responded to my questions told me that they’d found no reason to suspect that he had not written what they’d read. Rivka Galchen, a staff writer at The New Yorker and an associate professor at Columbia, worked closely with both Brown and his mother across four semesters [during his MFA program]. Although it had crossed her mind, at first, that his writing might be influenced, the worry vanished over time, based on what she saw. “I’m not a doofus,” she told me. And even if some doubts had lingered, she would have felt both unqualified and disinclined to investigate the question. “Do I have students whose girlfriends write their prose? Do I have students who use AI? I have no idea,” Galchen said. “I feel like I have to take it on faith.”
One more:
Mona Simpson taught Brown in two classes at UCLA and supervised his senior project, an early draft of Upward Bound. “He has a natural instinct for the shape of a story,” Simpson told me. “I truly have no doubts about Woody’s authorship.” But over the course of our conversation, she acknowledged the vagaries of collaboration — the possibility of some interpretation at play: “It could be that they’ve worked together so long that she can intuit some of what he’s intending. I don’t know.”
These responses are glib given what’s at stake here, but I can also understand how this puts individual instructors in a tough decision. Asking tough questions about Woody and Mary Brown is clearly the right thing to do, but it feels like the wrong thing to do. Wouldn’t it be much easier to assume that their communication system works, that someone, somewhere, had done the required rigorous testing? It’s a form of very human buck-passing, especially because it isn’t individual instructors or professors, after all, who make decisions about disability accommodations — it’s administrators.
I reached out to UCLA and Columbia University about this. Now, these institutions have certain obligations under federal law regarding Woody’s privacy. I wouldn’t expect them to renege on these obligations. Instead, while disclosing that I was writing about the Woody Brown controversy for this newsletter, I simply asked what their more general policy was toward facilitated communication. I sent both schools’ media offices versions of this email:
