To the Editor:
I was dismayed to read Alan Levinovitz’s recent article, “Are Colleges Getting Disability Accommodations All Wrong?” (The Chronicle Review, September 25). Asking whether we are giving too many accommodations begs the question of what, exactly, the right number of accommodations is and who sets that standard.
Restrictive standards in academic environments often function as a way to maintain status. In the past, as my own research shows, universities used increasingly rigorous standards for academic English to control who earned a college education, especially as students from a range of social backgrounds, with diverse English practices, enrolled in higher numbers (Elliot, 2005, Hawhee, 1999, Von Bergen, 2023). Withholding accommodations or granting them only after challenging documentation and re-testing requests may likewise create an inhospitable academic environment for disabled students.
Since Ed Roberts attended Berkeley in the 1960s, disability accommodations have allowed disabled students to receive the same education as non-disabled students. Accommodating learning-related disabilities such as ADHD has expanded this access. Yet disabled people continue to face enormous hurdles to receiving accommodations, including unwarranted surveillance and skepticism about their condition (Price, 2024). Levinovitz does not grapple with this research.
Providing legally-required accommodations is a first step, not a last step. The process of accommodating students has the potential to improve university education for everyone. Levinovitz observes that many accommodations, such as extended time on tests, benefit non-disabled students as well as disabled students. Indeed, this is the goal of universal design for learning (UDL), a curb cuts-style pedagogical approach. Just as the ramps built into sidewalks allow everyone from wheelchair users and low-vision pedestrians to parents with strollers to easily navigate between sidewalk and street, UDL reconstructs the learning environment to allow for the movement, education, and growth of as many people as possible.
As an educator, I want to build this world, one where all of us — students, faculty, and staff — have the resources, time, and understanding necessary to learn, to teach, and to be our best selves.
That road does not lead through more restrictive accommodations. It leads through more generous and just ones.
Megan Von Bergen
Assistant Professor of English
Murray State University
