This essay is excerpted from a new Chronicle special report, “The Accessible Campus,” available in the Chronicle Store.
Faculty members have been getting a flood of accommodation requests lately from students seeking “flexibility” because of mental-health needs. Often they ask for deadline extensions or excused absences. But even when a student has an official notice from campus disability services — “this student has been granted flexibility on attendance” — it’s often left up to the faculty member and the student to figure out exactly what that means.
These accommodations are essential to the health and success of our students, but they can cause challenges — miscommunication, confusion, and embarrassment — for everyone involved. As someone whose writing and advocacy have long focused on mental health and neurodiversity, I have some practical advice for faculty members on what to do, and not do, in accommodating flexibility requests.
A quick note: When I refer to neurodivergent (ND) students, I mean people whose mental or neurological function is different from what is considered typical. This includes not only students with ADHD or autism, but also those with anxiety, depression, or other mental-health disorders. Crucially, I’m also writing here about the many college students who are struggling with their mental health for whatever reason, and need our understanding and care to prevent them from doing poorly, dropping out, or facing something much, much worse.
Two key messages underlie all of the advice that follows: More communication. Less suspicion.
The purpose of flexible accommodations. In an interview, Joseph P. Fisher, executive director of the Academic Resource Center at Georgetown University, told me that such accommodations “are meant to provide students with equal access to university study” and “to support students with disabilities that may be episodic or unpredictable in nature.”
But flexibility accommodations are not meant to be an open-ended free-for-all. In particular, he said, they “should not violate core-curricular standards.”
What does that mean? Fisher explains: “In each degree program, there are core-curricular standards that students can be asked to meet, with or without accommodation, and any approved accommodations cannot fundamentally alter those expectations.” So for example, a student in a nursing program is required to log a certain number of hours with patients, and any student who needs accommodations must still complete that number of hours.
Staff members in the campus disability-services office can — and frequently do — devise accommodations to provide student access without “altering curricular expectations.” But to do so requires open lines of communication between that office and faculty members. When those two parties communicate and collaborate, they can strike a balance that supports neurodivergent students. With appropriate collaboration, Fisher said, we can “establish effective, reasonable accommodations” and, crucially, “reduce the amount of negotiating that students feel that they need to do.”
Professors are often irked by the nature and frequency of these requests. In a 2022 essay for Slate, the educator and writer Rebecca Schuman documented faculty frustration with flexibility accommodations. Even those who are very supportive of disability accommodations, she wrote, struggle with “the maddening vagueness of the word ‘flexible.’” She interviewed a professor who said the accommodations letter “is often the final (or only!) communication about the student’s needs, and it contains nothing to specify exactly how many extra days the instructor is supposed to offer each assignment.”
I am very sympathetic with professors who want to help but receive little or no institutional support in doing so. Some professors have minimal flexibility in their classrooms, thanks to rigid departmental or institutional rules. Or they are overworked and underpaid (as I was, spending my entire teaching career off the tenure track), and granting accommodations can feel like yet another burden.
But that’s the problem: The structure of higher education, and our society at large, makes disabled people (and accommodations) seem like a burden. And that entrenched “disability as burden” mind-set is precisely the kind of ableism that we in higher education should be working against.
In fact, it’s not unusual for flexibility accommodations to be granted. Nor are they new, having been the go-to solutions commonly offered to ND students for years. Research shows that the most common ND accommodations include “extended test time, note takers, distraction-free test areas (i.e., in a quiet room, testing alone), flexible or extended due dates for assignments, and the use of technology in the classroom (i.e., laptops, smart pens).”
What’s different now is the sheer volume of flexibility requests, especially in the wake of Covid. More faculty members are receiving these requests, and more are getting them from many more students.
Who to turn to (and not) for guidance. Leaving the negotiation of accommodations to the individual faculty member and student is rarely the right move. Professors who are confused or frustrated by the vagueness of a flexibility request need to get in the habit of reaching out to the campus disability-services office for clarification, rather than trying to work out complex details directly with a student.
Faculty-student negotiations have a distinct imbalance of power, even when the instructor is in a contingent position. Too often, professors ask students to explain their disabilities — a violation of federal law — and then make suggestions that students feel pressured to accept. (Privacy should be a paramount concern during any conversations about flexibility accommodations. Professors should not ask the student or the disability office for information about that student’s mental-health issues.)
The trouble is, although many disability offices are doing the best they can, they are chronically underfunded and understaffed. For faculty members, then, it can be another source of frustration to reach out for advice only to find there aren’t enough staff experts at the college to provide it.
I get it. But professors must keep asking for guidance nonetheless. “Faculty are ultimately the ones who can talk with precision about the core expectations of the courses that they have developed,” Fisher said. And “DS staff can guide faculty in the way that they should integrate accommodations into their course designs.”
Most of all, resist taking out your annoyance on ND students, who are already some of the most vulnerable people on the campus.
Students sense your frustration. Even those comfortable with their neurodivergence are well aware of the stigma attached to disability. Stigma means “shame,” and in higher education, neurodiversity or mental-health struggles are still considered shameful in many circles. After all, college is about learning, which is about brains, and if your brain isn’t “typical,” what does that say about your fitness for higher education?
I spoke about this with “Lisa” (a pseudonym), a freshman in an honors program at a top East Coast university who has chronic migraines and associated reading-comprehension issues. When Lisa started college, she came prepared with all of the medical records and testing required to pass smoothly through campus disability services and acquire accommodations, such as extended testing times and flexible assignment deadlines. But she’s been disappointed with how they’ve worked in practice during her first year.
“There is very poor communication between the teachers and disability services,” she said. “From faculty, I perceive a general irritation with the whole system.” A case in point: This spring, her professor informed her, “less than 24 hours before my final exam, that I wouldn’t be able to take it at the time I had scheduled at the testing center.” The professor, she said, “was afraid of cheating — and I had scheduled to take it earlier than the other students. But because she gave me so little notice, I had to wait two days before I could schedule another opening at the testing center.” Meanwhile, she had already studied for the test, and the delay disrupted the rest of her exam-week schedule.
Distrust is not uncommon. Too many faculty members buy into the “disability con” — the idea that students who seek accommodations are trying to game the system by faking disabilities, demanding blank-check accommodations, or even sharing their early exams with classmates in violation of the honor code.
That kind of faculty reaction causes some students to fear asking for help at all. They worry that a professor will not respect their accommodation request, and will treat them poorly throughout the course. Faculty members frustrated by this process, Lisa said, are “taking it out on the wrong people — the students. They’d rather blame the students instead of blaming the university for failing to communicate.”
The question is: What can we in higher education do to ease the stress of an accommodations system that does not always work smoothly for students or faculty members?
Swallow your misgivings and ask for guidance. Follow Fisher’s advice and reach out to your campus disability-services office. In my research, few faculty members considered this to be an option. As Fisher points out, the very first step a faculty member should take when confused by a student’s flexibility request is to seek clarification from the office that issued the accommodation in the first place.
Communicate better with ND students. This is especially important if you, as a faculty member, need to make up for any shortfalls caused by an overwhelmed disability office. As Lisa shared, “I had a really great experience with one teacher who went above and beyond to understand every aspect of what I needed and how to best support me.” Instead of making presumptions, the professor opened up a dialogue and let Lisa guide the conversation about her needs.
That professor provides an excellent model. Even if a swamped disability office isn’t communicating with you as well as you would like, you can start a conversation with the student about their academic needs. As a faculty member, you have the power. So start the dialogue on as equal a footing as possible by admitting you are on unfamiliar ground with this situation and letting the student take the lead. Second, make sure your responses are free of that note of irritation, or worse, of suspicion that the request is a con.
If you can have an empathetic conversation with your ND students, you will be able to collaborate and find clarity about what “flexibility” means for a particular student in your class.
Reconsider your course design. The web is filled with good advice and examples of ways to revamp your courses so that they are more accessible for ND students and require fewer flexibility accommodations in the first place.
Learning about the difference between accessibility and accommodations can help you design your course in such a way that flexibility requests don’t seem disruptive. As an academic and a neurodivergent person myself, I have developed courses that center accessibility for all students rather than designing an inaccessible course that requires special accommodations for any ND (or otherwise disabled) student.
Instead of the “us vs. them vs. them” attitude that prevails on too many campuses between the faculty, the students, and the disability-services office, we need a “one for all, and all for one” approach to flexibility requests.
