
This special report examines the challenges that students, academics, and colleges face in dealing with disability on campus. It includes the voices of people who struggle with physical disabilities that make it difficult to navigate older buildings and lovely grounds, and of others who have less-visible conditions such as bipolar or autism-spectrum disorders. Some scholars, having learned how to manage their own conditions, have built successful academic careers despite having blanked out in the middle of a speech or being forced to suddenly cancel class or take a medical leave. Our coverage also reflects some continuing debates relating to disability, including whether the philosophy of universal design — design that is meant to benefit everybody — sufficiently accommodates those with special needs.
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Disability Experts Debate Merits of Universal Design
The philosophy aims to make physical spaces, products, and even learning itself accessible to all. What does that mean on campuses? -
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As Standards Change, Disability Officers Race to Keep Up
Recent federal decisions have upended college policies on two important questions: whether students may keep emotional-support animals in dorms, and whether colleges may bar suicidal students from campus. -
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How 4 Professors Built Careers Despite Mental-Health Struggles
Scholars with mental, neurobiological, or learning disorders often find themselves struggling in silence. Several of them tell how they have found ways to succeed. -
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Student Diversity at More Than 4,600 Institutions
Explore data on the race, ethnicity, and gender of students at 4,605 colleges and universities in the fall of 2014. -
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College Facilities Evolve From Accommodation to Inclusivity
These campuses have advanced from doing the minimum necessary to meet the needs of those with mobility impairments to understanding that their experience should be the same as anyone else’s. -
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How One College Helps Students With Learning Disabilities Find Their Way
Even students who aren’t enrolled at Landmark College can attend its summer program, where they develop strategies to help them succeed when they return to their home campuses. -
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‘You Have to Be Fearless’
Overcoming stigmas is one of many challenges for students on the autism spectrum. -
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Judge What I Say, Not How I Talk
Everyone has a dialect and an accent, and one isn’t better than another. A program at North Carolina State teaches students and faculty to respect how others speak. -
Accessibility
Video: DeafSpace by Design
Gallaudet University architects and researchers are establishing design guidelines that may be useful to other communities with sensory and accessibility concerns. -
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Eating Disorders at Home and on Campus: A Mother’s Story
Colleges must be prepared to engage in difficult conversations about mental illness with students and their families, writes a professor with dual perspectives on the problem. -
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How My Eating Disorder Nearly Killed Me
A student’s account of her lonely battle with anorexia highlights the need for college employees to show that they care. -
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Extra Time on an Exam: Suitable Accommodation or Legal Cheating?
For the sake of students with and without disabilities, we need more research on the value of various instructional accommodations. -
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Fostering Open Communication in a Culturally Diverse Classroom
Helping students develop an awareness of their own cultural narratives and differences requires concrete strategies. -
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Teaching Against Islamophobia in the Age of Terror
Presenting the classroom as an emotionally neutral space does a disservice to students trying to make sense of the racial realities unfolding around them. -
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The Fafsa as Barrier for First-Generation Students
Simplify it, urges one student who barely got through the lengthy form. Either that or provide a lot more support in completing it. -
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Elite Colleges and the Language of Class
Until the contradiction between welcoming and delegitimizing low-income, first-generation students is removed, colleges will not be truly inclusive. -
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Committed to Diversity? Show Me the Money.
Those dollar figures reflect an institution’s true priorities, and too often multicultural-affairs offices are left begging. -
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Operation Retain
An experimental seminar teaches some essential cognitive and behavioral skills to first-year students at risk of dropping out.