Aurora Berger

 Accessibility in Higher Education

Aurora Berger

In this paper I will do my best to lay out frameworks for learning and unlearning the structures of ableism and disableism in disability education. I will break this conversation down into the following subsections: assessment methods and considerations, community and identity, digital tools, modalities of learning and teaching, and ethical considerations.

I’ll frequently cite blog posts and social media here for a few reasons. One, social media is a critical resource for disabled people to network and dispense important information, as the internet allows us to connect from all over the world – extraordinarily important in connecting to resources and spreading information. Twitter in particular has become a space of resources for people without access, including disabled lawyers, social workers, and journalists. Two, I will always prefer to cite the actual marginalized person in question rather than someone else’s take on a situation, and three, there is a major lack of proper reporting on these issues from most news sources.

A note on historical and legal significance:

It is extremely important to understand the legal history of accommodations in understanding how to best accommodate students. In 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act, ending (legal) institutional discrimination based on race. This would later become a template for the Americans with Disabilities Act. Nearly a decade later, in 1972, the ongoing work of disabled activists gained public support after the conditions at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, NY were exposed:

The appalling conditions at the Willowbrook State School, the largest institution for the mentally disabled at the time, spur outrage among the general American public after the inside of the institution is broadcast on cable news. With an enrollment far exceeding the institution’s capacity, there is lack of decent clothing, privacy and living space — prompting Robert Kennedy to deem it a “snake pit.” Along with a lawsuit filed by parents of Willowbrook residents, the publicity is enough to shut down Willowbrook and move the residents to community-living arrangements [sic]. (Reckase, 2013)

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act was passed in 1973, but the credit for this bill does not lie with the lawmakers who passed it. The credit for this and subsequent laws belong to the disabled activists who fought for their rights. This activism is also directly tied to academic institutions, as Ed Roberts, in 1962, sued his way into UC Berkeley and set a legal precedent for disabled students in academia. Section 504 prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities from any program receiving federal funding.

In 1975, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act is passed into law (this is now the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and was revised in 1997 and a new version, IDEIA, was passed in 2004). This act, as well as many subsequent laws, pertain only to students in elementary and secondary schools. Subsequent laws in this category include Access to Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE), and Least Restrictive Environment (LRE). While these laws do not apply to students in college and university classes, they are extremely important to know. Any student coming from a background of having disability services before college has worked within these structures.

In 1990 George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act ADA. Again, the credit for this law’s passage does not belong with him, it belongs with Senator Tom Harkin, who penned the law, and with Judith Heumann, Ed Roberts, The Rolling Quads, and the disabled activists who protested and climbed the steps of the US Capitol Building sans their accessibility devices during the Capitol Crawl.

The ADA operates as a civil rights law for people with disabilities. It provides legal protections from discrimination in employment, housing, access to public spaces, transportation, communication, accommodation and yes, education. It also provides the legal definition of disability.

Many other smaller laws and amendments have been passed since, but that is the basic timeline of disability rights in educational settings. We need to be aware of them because the legalities of disability education are fraught with lawsuits, and institutions are extremely wary of disabled students, particularly when it comes to finding ways to legally fulfill their duties, whether they that actually means helping the students or not. To quote Daniel Freeman, “mere compliance with the law does not equal fair or adequate service” (2015).

Assessment Methods and Considerations

I am beginning here with the topic of assessment because it seems the best place to broach the topic of accommodations, which will certainly be a theme throughout this paper. To be completely transparent, in all references to disability I will using the definition of disability as stated in the Americans with Disabilities Act: “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities of such individual; a record of such an impairment; or being regarded as having such an impairment.” (Department of Justice, 2010, p. 30).  It is extremely important to note that this definition acknowledges both diagnosed and undiagnosed disability. This is particularly significant in noting that diagnosis is absolutely a privilege, one that students often lack access to.

Access to reasonable accommodations is the foundation of disability education, especially at the college level. In his seminal book Academic Ableism, Jay Dolmage speaks of the architecture of ableism in higher education, which he refers to as the “steep steps to ivory towers”. This term is a metaphor, and of course a literal one in regards to the thousands of buildings on college campuses that lack wheelchair accessibility. Metaphorically, Dolmage uses the idea of the steep steps to illuminate the exclusivity of ascending the steps of education when the steps are laden with privilege. The steeper the climb, the more difficult for those whose lack of privilege hold them back in their ascension. This can be seen as well in all other forms of marginalization: race, gender, class, sexuality, and other identifiers outside of the ~academic norm~ (that is, white, cis-gender, male, heterosexual, wealthy). An excellent illustration of this principle can be found on our own campus on Pomona College’s infamous gates. The inscription on one side reads “let only the eager thoughtful and reverent enter here [sic]” while the other side reads “they only are loyal to this college who departing bear their added riches in trust for mankind”. The implications of these inscriptions on the gates to Pomona College are clear: this is (was) a university for those with money, access, and the means to quickly climb to the top of the ivory tower.

Circling back to accommodation, this steep steps metaphor is a key way of thinking of assessment and accommodation. One of the key phrases in the field is that “accommodations even the playing field for students with disabilities. Not that this makes them any more palatable to most people. Dolmage explains:

If faculty and students can be seen to just try to accommodate some of the time, to play along with the game of accessibility and inclusion, they know that their own intelligence, ways of learning, and embodiment can be kept safe from stigmatization, can be unaltered and unexamined. Students and teachers will show allegiance to exclusions that reinforce their privilege, and show allegiance to processes that maintain it. It is not just in assessment situations in the classroom in which teachers are asked to decide who gets to be included and who does not—­this selection is folded into every aspect of university life. (2017, p. 45-46)

The anecdotal evidence for these situations is abundant. The twitter accounts of almost every disabled person who has been through college have at least one story (and often many more). A recent twitter campaign called #AbledsAreWeird brought a flurry of them to the forefront. A personal favorite of mine is from Shoshanna Stern: “Got an F on a paper I worked very hard on. My teacher said even though he couldn’t prove it was plagiarism he knew I hadn’t written it because he had never seen a deaf person write in English like that” (2019). In fact, there’s an #AcademicAbleism hashtag on Twitter with over 800 conversations on it.

When it comes to assessment and creating assessment methods that can easily be adjusted for accommodation, I suggest that we look to elements used in Universal Design for Learning (UDL). I will note here that implementation of UDL is not the same thing as accessibility – regardless of what UDL fanatics will claim. However, elements of UDL can absolutely be implemented to make education more accessible. For example, the National Center of Education Outcomes suggests the following elements for UDL assessment design:

-       Inclusive assessment population

-       Precisely defined constructs

-       Accessible, non-biased items

-       Amenable to accommodations

-       Simple, clear, and intuitive instructions and procedures

-       Maximum readability and comprehensibility

-       Maximum legibility

Building off of these ideas, I also personally suggest the use of open ended rubrics and transparent assignment design. The principles of UDL that will really help you as an instructor in these situations will help you make less work for yourself at a later time. If your rubric design is open-ended, it will be much easier to adjust when needed.

So we have two scenarios for students seeking accommodations in college. One, they have never received accommodations before (common for those with no diagnoses, grew up in poverty, are experiencing new or progressive health conditions, or have experienced recent trauma) or two, they had a 504 Plan/IEP before college and are now adapting to the college accommodation system. That is to say, nobody comes into college with knowledge of how this system works. If they did have 504 Plan/IEP, it is highly likely that their parents are the ones who set them up. I personally know a whole lot about the paperwork and process but only because I obtained my 504 Plan during my senior year of high school when I had eye surgery just before my 18th birthday. Although my mother had to sign off on the forms, I was the one who organized all of the paperwork and made all of the arrangements. This is not a typical situation. Even so, having gone through the 504 process less than a year before, I had an extremely difficult time with getting accommodations in my freshman year of undergrad, and eventually gave up. These systems are rarely designed to actually help students to succeed. They are much more invested in the preservation of their intuitional statistics. Steep steps to the ivory tower indeed.

Relational - Community and Identity

One of the biggest elements of disability identity and community is, well, identity. Possibly one of the most well-known disability protocols in person-first language (person with a disability) … one which many disabled people, including myself, strongly dislike, instead preferring identity-first language (disabled person). Frequently this is a point of conflict in academic settings, with professors correcting disabled people for the ways that they choose to identify. This issue is of course, extremely complex. For example, d/Deaf communities and autistic communities generally use identity-first language, while many communities within mental illnesses and intellectual disabilities, strongly prefer person-first. There is no single correct answer, but as a rule, never correct a disabled person’s terms for their own identity. The issue here is not directly the language used, but rather the tone policing that academic institutions often use to push person-fist language as the only correct method.

On a related note, the terms differently abled, diffability, specially abled, disAbled, temporarily able-bodied, handicapped, wheelchair bound, handi-capable, and special needs are all ableist euphemisms and should not be used to discuss disability.

However, academic systems of ableism go so much further and deeper than language and macroaggressions. You’ll see them daily, if you know where to look and how to listen. Academic infrastructures are built for people without mobility restrictions. Accommodations are given little consideration or value. Physical and mental wellbeing (and by this I mean mental health and chronic illness not wellness as the opposite of disability) are not acknowledged. See, for example, an excerpt from an article about student accommodations at Barnard College:

At an SGA [Student Government Association] meeting last October, when students claimed they didn’t feel supported by the office [of Disability Services], Corbran said the policy of the office is to teach students to advocate for themselves because in the “real world,” no one will advocate for them.

But Arianna Scotti, BC ’20 and a student with disabilities, pointed out that in the real world, there are protections for people with disabilities, pointing to the office’s duty to comply with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which provide access to employment, public services, public accommodations, transportation and telecommunications for people with disabilities.

“This is the real world so I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Scotti said. “[The office] seems to think that in this fantasy world we’ll stop having [the] needs to live with special accommodations.” (Rojas-Posada, 2018)

And while teaching self-advocacy is a great practice, it is also important to remember that even asking for accommodations requires self-disclosure. A student physically cannot be given accommodations unless they have already self-disclosed their disability and advocated for their needs. The role of disability services in the academic institution is to support these requests.

Professors constantly fight back against accommodations. In 2017, a University of Illinois professor had to be put on leave after he refused to allow one of his student’s access to digital lecture notes, as stipulated in their accommodations. “Schlesinger said that he should not have to give one student an ‘advantage’ over other students in the course” (Bursztynsky, 2017). This is a common excuse from professors who willfully break the law, never mind that accommodations are not provided to give an advantage, they exist to level the playing field.

Another student from the article about Barnard College mentioned the way that professors often harass students into disclosing deeply personal information:

I have been questioned heavily about an accommodation to the point that I gave up on trying to convince the professor and dropped the course,” said Najaad Dayib, BC ’20, a student registered with the office. “The reason is because of ableism, professors are either incapable of empathizing with your disability, or they simply prioritize their course and their way of doing things over your success in their course. (Rojas-Posada, 2018)

Dayib is not alone in this, many students end up dropping classes when professors will not accommodate, which is a real problem at small schools with a limited number of professors in each department. How can a student succeed if the only professor who teaches a degree required course does not support their needs? One recent moment that comes to mind is a tweet from a Chapman college professor that read:

Last term I received 3 letters from my uni’s disability office excusing students from taking tests in class, participating in discussions, and giving a talk (they all have to give an 18 min. TED talk in my class). Disability? Anxiety. My response: Good. You should feel anxious!” (2018)

Matthew Cortland, a disabled lawyer, has been widely outspoken about the ways that Boston University and George Mason University both tried to/did violate the ADA. The former cost him a master’s degree in public health that he is still only a few credits short of receiving, and the latter had to be threatened with a lawsuit before they would comply. These issues are pervasive.

Learning and teaching modalities

The first step in understanding learning and teaching for disabled students is awareness of the frameworks that our conceptions of disability are based on. Disability is primarily understood through the medical model and the social model. The medical model locates disability as a deficiency within the individual body, and uses medical and technological intervention to diagnose, accommodate, and/or cure the disability. The social model locates disability within society, citing ableism and a lack of accessibility as its causes. The social model dictates that if an environment is fully accessible and the people within that environment are not ableist, otherwise disabled people become “normal”. There are many problems with each of these models, but they are important to understand. The medical model is the one that is used by the medical industrial complex, it is entrenched within our conversations of deficiency and cure. The social model is a learned philosophical one. We are brought up in a world that locates disability inside of the body.

It is important to understand these models when we begin to broach the ways we can construct and deconstruct notions of disability in the classroom. Institutions have always adhered to the medical model, positing that students with disabilities are broken, deficient, and unworthy of learning. This is where we must explore the social model, make our classrooms accessible, ask not “why can’t you learn in this built environment”, but rather “how can we adjust this environment to help you to learn?”

The educational framework that we use to create accessibility in the classroom is Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

The Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) of 2008 defined UDL as follows. “Universal Design for Learning (UDL) means a scientifically valid framework for guiding educational practice that — (a.) provides flexibility in the ways information is presented, in the ways students respond or demonstrate knowledge and skills, and in the ways students are engaged; and (b.) reduces barriers in instruction, provides appropriate accommodations, supports and challenges, and maintains high achievement expectations for all students, including students with disabilities and students who are limited English-proficient.” (SREB, 2017, p. 4).

It is important to remember that UDL does not only benefit students with disabilities, it benefits everyone. This is often the teacher or administrator’s argument against UDL. If you are concerned about giving one student an advantage, why not level the playing field and give all of your students that advantage? If a student with a visual disability needs copies of the slides, give them to all of your students. If you need to give your lecture notes to one student, give them to everyone. Isn’t the point of education that your students are learning?

UDL is a framework of teaching every student, situated in the belief that any tools needed by a student will be of use to all other students. In her article on using UDL as a vehicle of equity, Gayitri Kavita Indar expands this argument even further:

The first proposed component of an equity-based approach to UDL utilizes intersectionality, with its origins in Black feminism and Critical Race Theory, for a complex understanding of demographic data (Crenshaw, 1989). Similar to UDL’s assertion that addressing the needs of those at the margins would inherently meet the needs of learners in the middle, Crenshaw (1989) emphasizes that meeting the needs of the multiply disadvantaged (e.g., African American, female, disabled) would inherently address the needs of the singularly disadvantaged. Additionally, utilizing intersectionality counteracts the Western tendency to arrive at fragmented understandings of participants, either focusing on only one demographic component or as viewing each as a separate entity (Lorde, 1984). Methodologically, it prevents an imbalance in the explanatory powers assigned to single categorical identifiers (e.g., only disability status), and thus, undermines efforts to address racism and discrimination (Crenshaw, 1989; Erevelles & Minear, 2010). (n.d., p. 1-2)

My belief is that the desire to withhold useful information from students, to needlessly watch them struggle, is a form of classist and privileged aggression. There is a pervasive idea amongst academics that education should be an uphill battle, and I ask: why?  Is our knowledge so precious that we must keep it locked in our ivory tower, only to allow the strongest and cleverest inside?

For many of these academics I believe it is actually the concept of innate intelligence that forms their defenses, and that is a massive problem. To quote Amy Squenzia, “intelligence used to justify our right to accessibility and our value as people is and ableist concept” (Ollibean, 2018). Squenzia, a multiply-disabled non-verbal autistic goes on to point out that IQ tests are created to fail disabled people:

There are many problems with standardized tests, as they are usually developed to evaluate speaking people with what is considered average motor coordination. According to the definition [which states that IQ is a score determined by one’s performance on a standardized intelligence test relative to the average performance of others of the same age], the idea of IQ is pointless: it is relative, it cannot be measured by an arbitrarily created metaphorical stick. It also fails because measuring what one should know at any given age is also arbitrary. Many disabled people like me have been institutionalized, and not given any education. Without access to information, how can a test grade our knowledge of said information? (Ollibean, 2018)

This idea is strongly echoed in a blog post from Liminal Nest, which also expands on the contexts within which we view intelligence:

When you actually try to pin down what some sort of inherent “intelligence” is vs “has learned some stuff, addresses ignorance” It becomes clear that intelligence is a social construct That is used to maintain privilege and also oppress others

there is no objective way to measure intelligence there’s a wealth of scholarship about how IQ and the SATs are better indicators of “having privilege” than “being intelligent”

Additionally, the racist/ableist fear-mongering about how “crack babies” are born with “lower IQ” and cognitive disability has been shown to be the result of poverty and prolonged stress on the human brain

A lot of our cultural obsession with “high intelligence” and even IQ tests themselves Is rooted in Social Darwinism and the eugenics movement “jokes” like the Darwin Awards directly reference our history of forced sterilization based on “intelligence”

Someone can clearly be ignorant of knowledge, information, facts, etc. Someone can have cognitive disabilities that affect one’s ability to learn and synthesize new information. However, when you try to get at the root of “genius” and “intelligence” … you find that they are things we made up and ideas we perpetuate [sic] (2018)

Taking these conversations into consideration, we as educators need to rethink how we use intelligence as a gate-keeper for learning.

One possible path toward recontextualizing intelligence is to look at Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences (a term coined in 1983, and certainly predating the above discussion) wherein every person possesses a set of various abilities and skills, each of which is instrumental to overall cognitive ability. These intelligences consist of linguistic intelligence, logical-mathematical intelligence, spatial intelligence, musical intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, naturalistic intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, and intrapersonal intelligence.

According to Gardner’s analysis, only two intelligences—linguistic and logical mathematical—have been valued and tested for in modern secular schools; it is useful to think of that language-logic combination as “academic” or “scholarly intelligence”. In conceiving of intelligence as multiple rather than unitary in nature, the theory of multiple intelligences … represents a departure from traditional conceptions of intelligence first formulated in the early twentieth century, measured today by IQ tests, and studied in great detail by Piaget (1950, 1952) and other cognitively oriented psychologists. (Davis, Christodoulou, Seider, and Gardner, 2012, p. 2)

I suggest that using Gardner’s ideas as a framework (although perhaps with a re-naming of the “intelligences”) allows educators to implement UDL more easily. Unlearning our preconceived understandings of intelligence will not be easy. As academics, we probably all pride ourselves on our intelligence, but I believe it is time to take pride in our openness to change.

Digital tools and learning environments

As I mentioned earlier, the internet is a critical tool for disabled communities. The irony of a visually disabled academic sorting through academic text sources in order to build a case for accessibility is not lost on me. Technology is constantly advancing, improving, creating new modes of communication and methods of learning. Screen readers, document scanners, text-to speech software are all helping disabled students to learn alongside their peers. However, it is important to remember that technology is not magic – and this is complex and expensive technology. This cost is important, because it can make necessary technology difficult to obtain for those who need it.

I believe there is a misconception among able-bodied people that accessibility software is extremely advanced – unfortunately it is not. There may be more advanced options available, and in fact I’m sure there are for those able to foot the bill, but reality is that the technology available to the vast majority of students is actually pretty low-tech. Textbooks need to be sent out months before a class starts to be scanned or turned into audio recordings. Text-to-speech is usually a droning computerized voice that mispronounces names and doesn’t understand line breaks.

Even as new technology-rich environments revolutionize the classroom, few make provision for people who are blind, dyslexic, or otherwise print-disabled. Just like buildings, digital resources can be made accessible to all through good design and planning. Electronic resources should be inherently accessible; for most people, the zeroes and ones that make up digital content are translated for display on screens, but the same information can be transmitted audibly or connected to an accessory that puts it into Braille. Mainstream touchscreen devices like the iPad and iPhone are fully accessible to blind users right out of the box. (Shachmut, 2013)

Many of the changes that faculty need to make are small – making sure any videos shown have captions, adding image descriptions to class resources, making syllabi and other documents properly formatted for screen readers.

Unfortunately, not all faculty or administrations are on board with these (very legally-required) changes. One particularly divisive issue in classrooms is teachers banning laptop use in their classrooms. It is of course illegal to ban a disabled student from using their laptop in the classroom if that laptop is a part of their accommodations, and this creates a lot of tension, as Pryal and Jack outline:

Only allowing students with documented disabilities to use laptops in classrooms makes them stand out even more and appear to receive special treatment. Students are then left to defend themselves, since instructors can't reveal why some students are permitted to have certain accommodations. (2017)

This of course also applies to cell phone bans – and these can be difficult issues to traverse. As educators we need to really evaluate how technology is best used in our classrooms. Notetaking and organization apps, Google documents and slides, digital learning systems like Blackboard and Sakai – all of these are tools that our students can utilize if we don’t ban their technology in the classroom. And of course, as Ruth Colker points out in her discussion of laptops and UDL, we cannot assume how all students will use technology in the classroom.

It is simplistic to assume that students with disabilities will always desire to use laptops. Some of them may actually find that their learning style is best suited to taking notes longhand. Thus, I do not mean to suggest that a laptop-permissive policy will benefit all, or even most, students with disabilities. It may only be a subset of students with disabilities who choose to use laptops. For that subset, however, it is beneficial not to have to identify as disabled to seek the alternative technology. It is better to have the practice embedded as part of Universal Design. (492-493)

Once again, we look to UDL as a method of technology integration. Using various classroom resources to the advantage of all students should be integrated into all of our practices.

The other important digital resource for disabled students is the recent increase in online courses. These courses (and indeed, full degree programs) can be a boon for students who students who struggle with traditional scheduling and classroom setups. However, there are important considerations to make within fully digital learning atmospheres to ensure that they are accessible. Of course it is also important to remember that although “respected institutions are increasingly incorporating educational technology and online learning into their milieus, there remains a pervasive stigma surrounding the validity and value of online degrees” (Collins, 2018).

Ensuring that students in online courses have easy access to all resources, conversations, and assignments is extremely important. An online classroom that provides access only when a student asks for it is not an accessible classroom. As Sushil K. Oswal writes in her essay about educational ableism:

Could we imagine the possibility of a digital world which values and is inclusive of our preferences? What would be the feel of cyberspace to the disabled if its designers valued sound, silence, and touch, with the same gusto as they have treated vision and obsessed over visuals? (n.d.).

The ethics of disability education

The ethical implications of disability education have been consistently outlined throughout the previous sections of this paper, but there are several other important issues that educators need to be aware of. Many disabled students are coming from decades of education-related trauma, and societal expectations for their educational success are not exactly high:

A recent study by The Hechinger Report found that only one-third of college students with disabilities graduate from four-year institutions within eight years of enrollment, and

41 percent graduate from two-year institutions within the same time frame. The 

Huffington Post concurs that this is a crisis, and these data do not encompass the number of students who -- like me -- have to halt their educational careers due to the onset of an illness or injury. Higher education therefore presents a catch-22 for students with disabilities. Enrolling may seem tenuous, physically strenuous (if at all possible) and even irresponsible given that many people with disabilities are poor or low income, and a pile of student loans adds burden to an already tilted probability of independence. (Collins, 2018)

It is important, therefor for all educators to understand the current educational-social-political climate and how it is affecting our students. This is only a small sample of what is going on right now, and this is only the education-related issues—there are of course many more things happening outside of the institution.  

One of the biggest ethical dilemmas regarding disability in education happens outside of the classroom – the matter of enrollment is fraught with ableism. Many disabled students face outright discrimination in simply enrolling as a student at universities. I myself was almost forced to drop out of my undergraduate university before I had begun over an ADA accommodation issue. In the end I couldn’t afford to fight with them, the school won, and I ended up miserable but enrolled. However, many students have non-negotiable accommodations that universities will use to keep them from enrolling in the first place. In 2018 the University of Notre Dame claimed that a student’s accommodations created “undue burden” and refused his accommodations for epilepsy, forcing him to withdraw from the school. “Notre Dame’s demand — increase your risk of dying or leave — is the type of below-the-surface discrimination imposed by some universities and employers on people with epilepsy, a condition greeted in society with ignorance and fear.” (Eichenwald, 2018). This kind of behavior often goes unnoticed by our able-bodied peers because it does not make national headlines, and due to lack of resources and lack of access to legal advice, disabled students are rarely in a position to fight back against violations like these. It is also important to remember that these things are often happening to students at eighteen years old – who are in no way equipped to take on a massive university in court or otherwise. 

The recent college admission scandal, where 50 parents and college officials were charged in connection with fraudulent college admission of wealthy students, has some long-lasting implications for disabled students:

“There are already too many hoops and hurdles disabled students must navigate in order to vindicate their civil right to higher education,” said Matthew Cortland, a lawyer and disability activist based in Boston. “My fear is that these celebrity fraudsters will incite a crackdown on accommodations. Schools and testing companies will make it even more burdensome for disabled students to get the accommodations that allow them to realize their civil right to access higher education.” (Feder Ostrov and Ibarra, 2019)

This scandal is only going to cause more skepticism and distrust of students with testing accommodations, making it more difficult for students to get the support that they need. And, as Imani Barbarin points out:

While they [the parents charged in this case] were able to buy their way into disability accommodations, having one’s needs met in an educational setting is extremely difficult to organize, even harder still for many black and brown disabled students whose race inhibits their ability to be diagnosed in the first place. (2019)

The distrust of testing accommodations doesn’t end in college either. Many faculty are strongly against testing accommodations, as seen in an op-ed by Bruce  Pardy, a law professor at Queens University. He writes:

When a professor awards an A to the best exam and a B to the middle of the pack, she discriminates between exams. Therefore, she also discriminates between students on the basis of their cognitive skills and mental abilities: how well they can think, learn, analyze, remember, communicate, plan, prepare, organize, focus and perform under pressure. Discrimination is one of the purposes of the exam. That discrimination is not illegal or inappropriate. No accommodation need be made.

This mindset, one where intelligence is once again the gates of the ivory tower, is perhaps the ethical quandary most faced by faculty. Is it truly about ethics when mandated by law? One would think not, but it seems that it is. There is a pervasive misconception that students are taking advantage of the system, but once again I believe this conception comes out of the idea that students only learn through failure. Accommodations like these only need to be used when there is a time limit – what if instead, there wasn’t one? What do we as educators gain by limiting our students learning potential?

Even once enrolled, staying enrolled can be particularly difficult for disabled students – or even students who are perceived as having a disability. Over the past several years there has been a spate of exposés and lawsuits against major institutions over the mishandling of student’s mental health crises. Many of these cases have horrifying similarities, and they can read as cautionary tales for many students struggling with depression, Bipolar Disorder, or other mental illnesses.  In 2012 Angie Epifano, an Amherst College student wrote an article for her college newspaper outlining the ways in which Amherst had mishandled her depression after being raped by a fellow student. In education we often tell students to seek help from campus counseling services, but cases like this one show reason to be wary of these resources:

I went to the counseling center, as they always tell you to do, and spoke about how genuinely sad I was at Amherst, how much I wanted to leave, and how scared I was on a daily basis… Twenty minutes later campus police was escorting me [sic] into an ambulance. They were even less understanding: There’s something seriously wrong with you; you’re not healthy and normal right now. No, you can’t say no. You HAVE to go, but don’t worry, you won’t have to be there too long. This is for your own good. Amherst cares about you and wants you to get better. (2012)

Epifano was then forcibly admitted to a hospital psychiatric ward, and upon release had to petition Amherst to allow her to move back to campus. The college has policies that prohibit students from returning to campus after psych ward admission, even though the college had forced her to be admitted. Epifano was then placed on what was essentially academic probabtion – her study-abroad cancelled, no senior thesis, no friends off campus. All because she had turned to the campus counseling center in a time of desperation. Epifano withdrew from the school shortly after.

A similar account came from Danielle Miller, a former student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Miller took to Medium and Tumblr to recount how she was suspended from RISD for being depressed. Although, as she has made it clear, she never actually told them that she was depressed. Miller, like Epifano, had visited her campus counselor after a particularly tough week. After five minutes, deciding that the counselor wasn’t paying much attention to her and that she would find someone local to speak to instead, she attempted to leave and was surprised to find that she was not allowed to. Like Epifano, Miller was then transported against her will by ambulance and admitted to a psychiatric ward. She was not allowed back to campus, only allowed 10 minutes to pack a few of her things, although the school claimed she would be allowed to return in the next week for the beginning of the spring semester. However, it soon became clear that she would not be allowed to return unless medicated for depression. Extremely confused, Miller then obtained the hospital records from her stay at the psych ward. The college counselor had fictionalized multiple suicide attempts as a method of having her admitted.

After petitioning the school to allow her back, Miller returned to campus only to once again have the same college counselor call the police to arrest her and bring her back to the hospital. She had not had any contact with the counselor since the first five-minute meeting. Once again, Miller was not allowed to return to campus, and was eventually suspended for “disrupting the rules of conduct”—or in other words, being depressed. (Miller, 2014)

These are not isolated cases. Princeton university has been sued twice in recent years for banning students from returning to campus after suicide attempts, one after a sexual assault by another student in 2015. This student was then expelled for failing to maintain a B average when the school refused to accommodate his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The other student was banned from attending his classes, then forced to withdraw after missing the classes he was banned from attending. (Skelding, Swartz).

These issues may not seem like ethical issues for educators, indeed they are largely administrative. However, the mental and physical wellbeing of our students is and should always be extremely important. How can a student succeed if they are fearing suspension for seeking help? What resources can we give our students in order to help them survive in this environment? These questions should help us to build our syllabi, our discussions, and influence our pedagogical decisions. Above all else I urge faculty to provide information regarding counseling and health services that are not campus-related, and understanding what exactly the disability services office can and cannot do. As long as our institutions fail to support our students’ needs, our ivory tower with its steep winding steps will remain inaccessible.

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