Introduction

Supporting students, faculty, and staff with disabilities IntroductionNearly 50 years ago, congress enacted the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, barring discrimination against people with disabilities in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance, including colleges and universities.The Americans With Disabilities Act, which expanded the prohibition to all organizations serving the public, regardless of whether they receive federal funds, followed 17 years later, in 1990.Federal law defines disability as “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.” The term encompasses both visible differences, such as immobility, and invisible ones, like learning disabilities and emotional disorders.Together, the Rehabilitation Act and ADA opened up academe to thousands of students, faculty, and staff members with disabilities, promising them equal access to education and employment. From 1978 to 2011, the proportion of undergraduate students with a disability nearly quadrupled; by 2015, nearly one in five undergraduates, and more than one in 10 postbaccalaureate students, reported having a disability.Yet higher education is still a long way from the laws’ goals of equity for Americans with disabilities. Participation in college varies widely by disability category, with students with autism or emotional disturbances much less likely to enroll than those with learning or physical disabilities, federal data show. Students with mental disabilities are less likely than their peers without such disabilities to graduate from college, too.Even today, only 18 percent of adults ages 25 and older with disabilities hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, a rate only half that of adults without disabilities, according to the United States Census Bureau’s “American Community Survey.” And people with disabilities are still underrepresented among college faculty and staff members. An estimated 4 percent of the faculty has a disability, even though a quarter of the U.S. adult population has one, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Colleges have made huge strides since the laws took effect, creating and expanding offices dedicated to serving students with disabilities, including people with disabilities on committees focused on physical accessibility, and hiring heads of IT accessibility. Along the way, many institutions have moved from a “medical” model of disability, which treats disability as a defect or deficit to be fixed, to a “social” model, which, using principles of universal design, seeks to remove barriers that inhibit the inclusion of people with disabilities in campus life.Still, many colleges are falling short of full compliance with federal disability laws, lawyers and advocates for people with disabilities say. Disability-based claims make up the majority of discrimination complaints filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which also handles cases alleging discrimination based on sex, race, and national origin. In the past decade, the office has issued resolutions in close to 5,000 cases that accused schools and colleges of discrimination on the basis of disability.Meanwhile, growing caseloads are putting pressure on disability-resource offices, as students seek accommodations for an expanding range of conditions. A 2018 survey by the Association on Higher Education and Disability, an international professional group dedicated to full participation in higher ed for people with disabilities, showed that colleges of fewer than 1,500 students averaged 94 students for each full-time staff member, while institutions of 30,000 or more students averaged 159 to one. On many campuses, disability-resource staff members are taking on heavier caseloads with no additional financial support, office leaders say.“There are more requests” for accommodations, “the requests are more complex, and we’re not able to add new staff because we’re not getting more funding,” said Amanda Kraus, immediate past president of the Association on Higher Education and Disability.The pandemic, with its sudden shift to online learning, created new challenges for people with disabilities and the offices that serve them. Students, faculty, and staff members struggled with inaccessible technology and environments, while disability-resource offices, facing a flood of accommodation requests, struggled to keep up.But the pivot to remote instruction also proved what some students and employees with disabilities have been arguing for years: that remote classes (and conferences and meetings) are not only possible but in some cases preferable.Now, as colleges emerge from the worst of the pandemic, some students, faculty, and staff members with disabilities are asking colleges to preserve some of the flexibility that the Covid precautions created, resisting a return to a normal they say didn’t work for them.“What the pandemic did is create an opportunity,” said Jasmine E. Harris, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. By exposing “the shortcomings in a system set up for able-bodied, neurotypical individuals,” and forcing colleges “to change the way we approach education,” it opened the door to lasting change.This report highlights how campus leaders and faculty members can confront prejudice against people with disabilities in the classroom and workplace, why it’s so important that colleges make physical and digital spaces accessible to all, and the challenges that students and employees with disabilities face in obtaining accommodations. It explores how colleges can ease the transition from high school to college for students with disabilities; the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, including student activism against a “return to normal”; amplified calls for disability cultural centers; and the challenges of supporting people with long Covid.Return to Table of ContentsSection 1: Opening the Physical — and Digital —Terrain to All Physical accessibility refers to whether campus spaces can be accessed by people with disabilities. Digital accessibility measures whether websites, tools, and technologies are accessible to people with disabilities. Both are critical to educational inclusion.If a building lacks working elevators, a student or faculty member using a wheelchair can’t get to class, and if an image on a website doesn’t include descriptive text, a blind student using a screen reader can’t interact with it.Physical AccessibilityFederal law requires colleges to ensure that people with disabilities are not denied access to programs or activities because of inaccessible facilities — buildings, roads, sidewalks, and parking lots among them.But the law doesn’t require that every facility be fully accessible. For facilities built or in construction before June 3, 1977, when the Rehabilitation Act’s Section 504 regulations took effect, it requires only that programs and activities taking place therein be made accessible to people with disabilities. A common way of doing that is to relocate the program to an accessible portion of the building or to another, accessible, building.When constructing or renovating a building, colleges follow federal accessibility standards and state and local access codes. Some colleges will go beyond these standards, incorporating principles of universal design in an effort to make campus spaces accessible to everyone.“Our goal is to universally design our built environment so we don’t need individual accommodations,” says Eric Bell, physical-access consultant at the University of Arizona.Consider restroom stalls. At the University of Arizona, all restroom stalls are designed to the same specifications, with the toilet paper and seat covers always in the same spot and a handle on the inside so users can pull the door closed. This consistency is critical for blind people and those with impaired mobility, but it benefits everyone, says Bell.Another example is automatic door openers, Bell says. The devices were designed for wheelchair users, but they can be useful for a facilities staff member pushing a tool cart or an art student carrying a large portfolio, too.Some campuses are also designing — or redesigning — spaces with their expanding neurodivergent-student population in mind. They’re replacing brightly colored and vibrantly patterned furniture and flooring with more subdued alternatives — “toning down the sensory overwhelmingness,” says Jane Thierfeld Brown, director of College Autism Spectrum, a counseling and consulting firm. And they’re adding “sensory rooms.”Those rooms, which may contain weighted blankets, white-noise machines, textured pillows, or fidget toys, offer students with autism, ADHD, anxiety, and other sensory challenges a place to go when they’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed by college life. But visiting one can be calming for students without disabilities, too, says Thierfeld Brown.Time-Consuming AdvocacyIn spite of these advances, students and employees with disabilities continue to confront numerous barriers when navigating college campuses. Elevators break down, sidewalks buckle under heat and cold, automatic door openers stop working, and people with disabilities have to hassle administrators to get the problems fixed.“The advocacy required to simply survive — not even thrive — is extremely time-consuming and emotionally draining,” says Laura Saavedra Forero, a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who uses a wheelchair. “You have to be vulnerable and share your experiences for folks to listen, and when you do, it seems like none of it really matters to them.” (Read more of her story here.)And even when campuses are complying with federal disability law, they may not be welcoming to people with disabilities, says Aimi Hamraie, an associate professor of medicine, health, and society and American studies at Vanderbilt University. For example: A campus may have accessible parking spaces but no map or signs indicating where they are; or it may have accessible bathrooms that are concentrated in newer buildings and spaced far apart.Hamraie argues that colleges should stop resting on claims of compliance and ask students and faculty members with disabilities, “What is your experience of this space; in what way does it not work for you, and what would make it better?”It was in this spirit that Hamraie created a crowd-sourcing project to map campus accessibility features. The Mapping Access project surveys faculty, staff, and students with disabilities to find out which features of the built environment matter to them, and then it holds campuswide “map-a-thons” to pinpoint the features’ locations. The resulting map shows the location of all-gender bathrooms, accessible building entrances, and sidewalk obstructions, among other features.“Meaningful access often means going beyond the minimum standards of the law,” says Hamraie, who has created a toolkit that others can use to create maps of their own.The Digital LandscapeWhen it comes to web accessibility, colleges follow the World Wide Web Consortium’s 12 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which are organized under four principles: Content must be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. There are three levels of conformance with the guidelines — A, AA, and AAA — and colleges typically strive for the middle grade, since some of the AAA success criteria aren’t applicable to or attainable for some content.As the use of technology has exploded, many colleges have hired coordinators of IT accessibility, or even entire teams, and ramped up training of faculty and staff members.The California State University system, for example, provides a centralized website where faculty and staff members can find tools to evaluate the accessibility of websites and web apps, and links to third-party training. In addition, many campuses have hired staff members to assist faculty members with incorporating principles of universal design into their courses.The University of Washington offers regular campuswide and small group training on digital accessibility, as well as one-on-one consulting with faculty and staff, and a self-paced Accessibility 101 course. Recently, it created a web page listing these training opportunities. Another website offers detailed guidance on creating, procuring, and using accessible technology.Yet many colleges still aren’t meeting basic web-accessibility standards, according to a recent analysis by AAATraq, a for-profit company that scans websites for ADA compliance to determine the risk of liability and offers to fix problems for a fee. It found that more than 90 percent of websites at the 2,000 colleges it had reviewed weren’t accessible to people who browse with assistive devices. In many cases, the websites lacked the fundamentals: alt text on pictures and captions on videos, says Rob Andrews, director of brokerages at the company. (Alt text describes the content of images and charts and can be read aloud by screen readers.)That high failure rate is at least partly because much of the internet is invisible to front-end users, Andrews says. It’s easier to spot accessibility issues in the physical world, he says — a cracked sidewalk or a broken elevator, for example — than in the virtual one.Another contributing factor is the sheer number of people — faculty, staff, and students — uploading content at colleges, says Michelle Hay, digital manager for AAATraq. Though some of them will have access to programs that make content accessible and run compliance checks, others won’t.“The problem is too many chefs,” Hay says. AAATraq, which also monitors other sectors, has been tracking colleges since late 2021.So far, the company’s findings have been “largely ignored” by the higher-ed sector, Andrews says. While hundreds of schools have signed up for AAATraq’s risk-control program, which charges $1,975 per website, the company only recently got its first college clients. Andrews acknowledges that colleges may have many more websites than K-12 schools, which often have only one, but argues the upfront investment could save colleges millions in legal fees — and spare them reputational damage, too.“The doors are wide open to litigation,” Andrews warns.Over the past two decades, hundreds of colleges have been the subject of lawsuits and federal discrimination complaints alleging failures in digital accessibility.Though many of these cases have been settled quietly, out of court, some have gotten national attention, such as the University of California at Berkeley’s recently resolved yearslong fight with the Department of Justice over the accessibility of its free online content — including open courses, conferences, lectures, sporting events, and graduation ceremonies — posted to its websites and other online platforms, like YouTube.Keeping PaceAnd it’s not just the web that colleges need to worry about when it comes to digital accessibility compliance. It’s all the technologies that make up a modern campus, including learning-management and course registration systems, interactive whiteboards, and classroom clickers.“It has to be systemwide,” says Chris Danielsen, director of public relations for the National Federation of the Blind.Historically, however, colleges have taken a reactive approach to compliance, fixing problems as they arise, instead of solving them proactively, Danielsen and other experts say.“It’s really easy for overextended staff to deprioritize accessibility on the front end when you know there’s an office [for disability services] that is obligated to provide students with what they need at the 11th hour,” says Kyle Shachmut, director of digital-accessibility services at Harvard University and co-chair of the Educause IT Accessibility Community Group.The Covid-19 pandemic, which forced colleges into all-digital modes of learning, underscored the problems with this “wait and see” approach, as digital-accessibility staff struggled to keep pace with the flood of PDFs uploaded without accessibility features and a sudden spike in demand for captioning services, says Jonathan Lazar, a professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park and author of a research study titled “Managing Digital Accessibility at Universities During the Covid-19 Pandemic.”“Everything had to be done digitally, and in many cases, universities hadn’t planned for accessibility,” Lazar says.As in the physical world, the burden of identifying problems in the digital space falls on students, faculty, and staff with disabilities, who may spend months or even years getting such problems corrected. It’s uncompensated, “invisible” labor that distracts from their own studies or work. As one blind assistant professor, who asked to remain anonymous because she does not yet have tenure, put it: “If I told the university every time something was inaccessible, I would literally have no time to do anything else.”Robert Englebretson, a blind faculty member at Rice University, says he once spent three years trying to get his institution to fix Cayuse IRB, a platform it had purchased for submitting forms to the institutional review board. Eventually, he gave up, figuring “it’s not going to happen until someone files a lawsuit.”“People with disabilities, like other minorities, spend a lot of energy and emotional labor doing things we shouldn’t have to do that the university should do,” he says.Faculty members and advocates with disabilities like Danielsen say colleges too often rely on vendors’ claims that a product is accessible, or their promises to fix it if it’s not. But no federal regulatory agency oversees vendors, and when they don’t follow through, it’s the college that can be held liable.Regarding the Cayuse IRB platform, the problem was eventually fixed, but it took years of pestering the company, said Adam Schmidt, an associate professor of psychological sciences at Texas Tech University who is visually impaired. Meanwhile, Schmidt has given up on another tool used for faculty reporting because it didn’t work with his screen reader; he submits his annual reports using Microsoft Word instead.“Accessibility for [faculty] software isn’t even on the radar for most universities,” Schmidt says.A spokesperson for Cayuse says the company is “committed to ensuring our software is accessible” and has created a program to support web-content accessibility standards.During the first wave of the pandemic, when colleges were rushing to secure the technology they needed for remote learning, many institutions bypassed their usual procurement controls, purchasing software and other tools that were inaccessible, Lazar says. Now, he says, “they’re going be stuck with them for a while.”Steps To A Digitally Accessible CampusStill, digital accessibility isn’t an impossible goal, Lazar and other experts say. Here’s their advice on how to get there.Take stock of where you are. Conduct an accessibility audit to identify any technical barriers that prevent people with disabilities from using a website or tool. If an audit is too expensive, start with usability testing, observing students, faculty, and staff members as they interact with technology, advises Nadine O. Vogel, chief executive of the disability advisory firm Springboard Consulting.Think beyond physical disabilities. Digital accessibility often focuses on people who are deaf or blind. But websites and other technologies need to be designed for a much broader audience, including neurodiverse students, who may find bright colors, scrolling updates, or gifs distracting or have difficulty engaging with large chunks of text.Make a plan. Digital accessibility should be included in colleges’ strategic planning, and the IT experts should be in on the conversation. As part of that process, colleges should prepare for future “surges” in digital demand so they won’t be caught flat-footed when the next emergency occurs, Lazar says.Train your faculty and staff members. Most colleges already do this, but many employees would benefit from additional training on creating accessible web pages and documents. And remember to keep it simple. If it feels overwhelming, professors may shy away from even the basics, like alt text and captions, says Eudora Struble, director of technology accessibility at Wake Forest University and co-chair of the Educause IT Accessibility Community Group. Colleges that lack the staff to conduct in-house training can outsource it to organizations like WebAIM.Make it easy for faculty and staff members to create accessible content. This one can be tough since some popular programs don’t offer easy-to-use accessibility checks, Shachmut says. But as much as possible, colleges should provide faculty and staff members with the tools to make their course materials accessible, without a lot of added effort. Website platforms like WordPress or Drupal allow users to easily create accessible websites, while Microsoft Word lets users check the accessibility of documents with a single click, much as they would check spelling or grammar.Teach the principles behind the practices. The guiding principles behind the web-content accessibility guidelines go by the acronym POUR: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Teaching the POUR principles “can help people understand what we’re aiming for,” Struble says.Train your students, too. Today’s students will build tomorrow’s technologies. Teach Access, a nonprofit, offers guidance on how to educate future technology designers, engineers, and writers — and professors — in creating accessible products and content.Vet your vendors. In 2021, Struble and accessibility experts from 14 other colleges added questions to the Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit — a widely used tool to measure vendor security and privacy risks — to gauge product accessibility. Asking these questions upfront, rather than harassing vendors to fix problems when they arise, can save institutions a lot of time and resources, experts say. If you still aren’t sure which product to choose, query colleagues in a professional group like Educause about what’s worked for them. And have students and faculty members test the products before you commit, says Danielsen.Hold vendors accountable. Finding an accessible product that checks all the other boxes can sometimes be challenging, disability advocates acknowledge. Still, until colleges make it clear that they won’t purchase a product that isn’t accessible, vendors will have little incentive to change. Struble suggests incorporating standardized language — like the Big Ten’s Standardized License Language, designed for libraries — into vendor contracts. “If enough institutions would say, ‘This isn’t OK,’ I think companies would see the bottom line pretty quick,” says Englebretson.Return to Table of ContentsSection 2: Accommodations in the Classroom and the WorkplaceAccommodations are adjustments to programs, policies, and procedures that aim to provide students and employees with disabilities with an equal opportunity to participate in academic programs and jobs.They include both auxiliary aids and services — such as screen readers, note-takers, and adaptive office furniture — and modifications to institutional policies, such as additional time on assignments, recorded lectures, and extensions of the tenure clock.A federal survey published in 2011, the most recent available, showed that the most common accommodations offered by colleges were extra exam time, classroom note takers, faculty-provided written course notes, help with learning strategies or study skills, and adaptive equipment and technology.In the elementary- and secondary-education system, schools are required to identify students with disabilities and assess their needs; in higher education, students must disclose their disabilities and seek accommodations themselves, just like faculty and staff members.Typically, student requests are handled by the disability-services office (sometimes called the Office of Disability Resources or Office of Student Accessibility, among other titles), and employee requests are handled by the human-resources department.Federal law requires colleges to provide academic and employment adjustments to people with disabilities unless doing so would fundamentally alter the program or create an undue financial or administrative burden.But the law doesn’t dictate how colleges determine if a person is disabled, saying only that the college’s documentation requirements must be “reasonable.” What one college deems essential, another may find excessive.Demands of DocumentationIn recent years, there has been a trend toward a “narrative” approach to assessing students’ needs, with institutions relying more on student interviews and history of accommodations, and less on psychometrics and formal diagnoses, says L. Scott Lissner, the longtime ADA coordinator for Ohio State University.That doesn’t mean colleges don’t seek third-party documentation — educational or medical records, as well as reports and assessments by health-care providers, school psychologists, and teachers — to validate student narratives, Lissner says; it’s just that greater weight is now given to the professional judgment of disability-services staff.That change is consistent with updates made in 2008 to the Americans With Disabilities Act that aimed to “make it easier for people with disabilities to obtain protection under the ADA,” according to guidance from the Association on Higher Education and Disability (known as Ahead), which Lissner helped draft.“Requiring extensive medical and scientific evidence perpetuates a deviance model of disability, undervalues the individual’s history and experience with disability, and is inappropriate and burdensome under the revised statute and regulations,” the guidance reads.Yet, in spite of this shift, many students with disabilities still don’t seek accommodations from their colleges. In an April 2022 survey, just over a third of students with disabilities said they informed their college of their disability.Lindsay Kubatzky, director of policy and advocacy at the National Center for Learning Disabilities, says some students are derailed by documentation demands. While Ahead advises colleges not to insist on “recent” documentation — noting in its guidance that “disabilities are typically stable lifelong conditions” — many colleges won’t accept psychoeducational evaluations that are more than three years old, Kubatzky says.Forcing students to get re-evaluated in college discourages them from seeking support, and disadvantages those who can’t afford the costly tests, Kubatzky argues. His group is backing a bill before Congress that would require colleges to accept a past Individualized Education Plan or 504 Plan as evidence of disability. (In the 2011 survey, 44 percent of colleges said they accepted an IEP and 40 percent said they accepted a 504 Plan from a secondary school as sufficient, standalone verification.)“We know that these disabilities don’t go away,” he says. “You shouldn’t have to prove over and over that you have something like dyslexia.”Other students forgo accommodations because they lack the executive-functioning or self-advocacy skills to seek them out without their parents’ support, says Annie Tulkin, founder and director of Accessible College, which advises families on the transition from high school to college. Obtaining accommodations in college requires students to be adept at planning, organization, time management, and prioritization — skills many neurodiverse students struggle with.“The process taxes almost every innate deficit related to ADHD, dyslexia, or autism,” says Alexander Morris-Wood, associate vice president for transitions and the student experience at Beacon College, in Florida, which caters to neurodiverse students.Ideally, students should be taught these skills before they arrive at college — in high school and in the home, says Tulkin. But colleges can fill in the gaps with coaching and workshops, she says. (For more on that, see “Easing the Transition From High School to College.”)Still other students managed without accommodations in high school and figure they won’t need them in college, either, Tulkin says. By the time they realize they need an adjustment, they are often overwhelmed and at risk of dropping out.Such students would benefit from better information about the accommodations process, Tulkin says. She suggests that colleges require faculty members to put disability statements on their syllabi and that they work more information into orientation, residential programming, and social-media posts.Why Faculty Members Don’t DiscloseWhile there are no national-level statistics on the share of faculty members who seek accommodations, experts say they’re even less likely to request them than students are.That may be partly because employees — and faculty members, in particular — tend to have more control over their schedules and environments than students do, Lissner says.Faculty members may also view the human-resources department with suspicion, seeing it as more compliance-driven and less mission-oriented than student-serving offices.When faculty members with disabilities do seek accommodations, they are often not believed, according to Margaret Price, an Ohio State associate professor who has surveyed and interviewed hundreds of faculty members through her Disabled Academics Study.Nicole Lee Schroeder, a postdoctoral fellow at Kean University who has a genetic condition that causes hypermobility, says she gave up on seeking accommodations from her institution after she was told that a decade’s worth of documentation and accommodations from two other universities wasn’t sufficient proof of her disability, and she’d need to get new medical documentation. She called the experience “dehumanizing.”“There is far more money being invested in figuring out who is cheating the system than in supporting disabled scholars,” she says.Travis Chi Wing Lau, an assistant professor of English at a small liberal arts college, describes the accommodations process as “a game of insider knowledge,” with faculty members with disabilities trading tips on how to secure accommodations over listservs and in Google spreadsheets.When Lau was denied his request for funding to make his home office accessible at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, shortly after he started the job, Lau decided not to appeal. It was too risky as a pre-tenured faculty member, he says.“There’s nothing worse than setting the tone of, I’m going to be the troublemaker disabled faculty member,” says Lau, who has chronic mobility challenges and pain from scoliosis.In many cases, faculty members will work out informal accommodations with their department chair or dean rather than go through the official channels. But that approach has drawbacks.For one thing, it relies on relationships between faculty members and their leaders, and leaders change. An arrangement that one department chair deems reasonable may seem outrageous to their successor. Faculty members may worry about being a burden on their department, which will have to pay for their accommodations.Pre-tenured faculty members, in particular, often fear that disclosing a disability will hurt their chances of being promoted — that they’ll be seen as “unfit for tenure,” says Aparna Nair, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto at Scarborough who is epileptic. That’s especially true of people with mental illnesses, she adds.“For every person who does disclose, there are hundreds who will not because they’re genuinely scared of the consequences,” she says. “Whether we acknowledge it or not, academia is very ableist.”Ableism In Academe — and What To Do About ItJay Dolmage, a professor of English at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, and author of Academic Ableism, defines ableism as “all the different ways we consciously and unconsciously value and idealize ability.” It’s distinct from “disablism,” which refers to prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination against people with disabilities, says Dolmage.Ableism permeates all aspects of our society, but it’s at its most powerful in competitive cultures like academe, which judges people by their productivity and celebrates overwork.“This is not a culture where disability is expected,” Dolmage says. “It’s always treated as a surprise.”Jasmine E. Harris, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania who has dyslexia, agrees. “There’s a belief that disability is inconsistent with high academic achievement and academic prestige,” she says.Academics with disabilities say ableism shows up in higher education in myriad ways — from policies that forbid computers in class, even though students with disabilities may need them to take notes, to hiring processes that assume faculty candidates will have the physical strength and stamina to get through a grueling day of interviews and meetings.To be disabled in academe is to be “a contradiction,” a unicorn, Lau says. If a person with disabilities is successful in academe, it’s often assumed that their disabilities must be “not that bad.”On many campuses, disability is treated as an “anomalous thing,” says Lau, who when seeking accommodations has been told “you’re the first to ask for this.”Being the “only one” on a campus — the only blind professor, the only postdoc in a wheelchair — can be a lonely, isolating experience. To build community, academics with disabilities often turn to listservs, like the one Robert Englebretson at Rice University created for blind academics over a decade ago.“We don’t really have mentorship or institutional support on campus, so we have to look elsewhere for that,” he says.Though many colleges host cultural groups or centers for undergraduates with disabilities, there are fewer spaces for graduate students and postdocs with disabilities to come together, says Schroeder. Two years ago, she created a private Discord group, the Disabled Academic Collective, as a forum for academics with disabilities to weather the pandemic and its aftermath. The group now has 750 members globally, with threads for academics at every career stage.“We’re sharing resources and embodied knowledge on how to make it in the academy,” Schroeder says.The ‘Flexibility’ DebateWhen lawmakers enacted Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act five decades ago, the students they had in mind were those with physical disabilities — students who were “deaf, blind, or in a wheelchair,” says Jane Jarrow, a consultant and expert on disability in higher education.By the time Congress passed the Americans With Disabilities Act, in 1990, ideas about what constitutes disability had expanded, and many of the students showing up in disability-resource offices had learning disabilities or other cognitive differences, like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Jarrow says.Today, a significant share of students receiving accommodations from their colleges have mental-health concerns and diagnoses. Rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidality among college students have been rising for years and reached record highs in the 2021-22 academic year, according to the latest annual Healthy Minds survey.This shift in the student population has led to a spike in requests for accommodations involving flexibility, including deadline extensions and excused absences.Disability advocates say flexibility can be critical for people with unpredictable or episodic conditions, such as autoimmune diseases and chronic pain or fatigue.But the recent flood of flexibility requests from students with mental-health conditions are less straightforward, requiring disability-resources staff to judge whether a student’s desire to miss class or get extra time on assignments is truly a matter of inclusion, Jarrow says.If a staff member determines that the request is reasonable, the ideal next step is for them to meet with each of the student’s professors to negotiate how much flexibility the student will get in each class, says Amanda Kraus, executive director of the disability-resource center at the University of Arizona.In some cases, a professor might agree to stream or record lectures whenever the student can’t attend; in others, such as performance-based classes like dance and science labs, remote attendance won’t be possible and missed classes will be difficult to make up. Similarly, while a professor teaching a small seminar class might be OK receiving missed work at the end of the semester, a professor leading a large lecture class may set stricter limits to keep the student on track and to keep their own workload manageable.“You can’t just say, Give the student flexibility. The faculty member is not going to understand what that looks like,” Kraus says.But not every office has the capacity to meet with every professor of every student with a flexibility accommodation. Consider a campus where 40 students have been granted flexibility on attendance or deadlines — if each of them is taking four classes, that adds up to 160 conversations with professors to negotiate accommodations. In those cases, a disability-resource office might give faculty members written guidance on how to put in place the accommodation — or might leave it to the faculty member to figure it out on their own, in consultation with the student.Katy Washington, president of Ahead, advises strongly against that latter approach, pointing to the power differential between students and professors.“To expect a student to be savvy enough to go through the process and not be intimidated is underestimating the vulnerability students have,” says Washington, who is also chief accessibility officer at Virginia Commonwealth University. Students often don’t know how to ask for extra time or days off, and when they do ask and the answer is no, they typically drop it, Washington says.Professors want clarity, too, said Rebecca Schuman, a professor at the University of Oregon who interviewed two dozen of her colleagues for an article on flexible deadlines. (While some accommodation letters specify how much extra time a student should get — one and a half times or two times the norm, for example — many leave it open.)“They just want to be told how many days” the student gets, Schuman says. “It’s discomfort with not having any control over your workload.”Both Schuman and Jarrow believe accommodation letters should be more prescriptive about what’s required of faculty, for the sake of students and professors alike.“Faculty need to understand that if an accommodation is necessary for access, they don’t have the option to not provide it,” Jarrow says.But Jarrow acknowledges that “there are others with just as much experience that believe it should be left to the faculty member’s good judgment and let the faculty member and student work it out.”The debate over flexibility in higher education spilled over into the general student population during the pandemic, when absences were expected and extensions became routine. But it all started with students with disabilities.Return to Table of ContentsSection 3: The Pandemic and Its AftermathThe abrupt shift to remote learning in the spring of 2020 taxed disability-resource offices and many of the students they serve. Blind students dealt with a glut of newly uploaded documents that were incompatible with their screen readers, while deaf students confronted captioning riddled with errors. Students with attention deficits struggled to focus amid the distractions of their homes. But some students, faculty, and staff members with disabilities welcomed the shift.For years, students and employees with disabilities that make in-person attendance difficult had been asking colleges for the option to attend class or work remotely, says Katy Washington, president of the Association on Higher Education and Disability, the membership group for disability-resource people at colleges. Most of the time, they were turned down, told it was a “fundamental alteration,” or an “undue burden,” she says. Then the pandemic hit, and, all of a sudden, everyone and everything was online.For Aparna Nair, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, the switch to remote conferences came as a relief. Nair, who is epileptic, becomes unusually exhausted by travel. She limits the number of conferences she attends to preserve her energy for trips home to India, but she worries about the professional consequences. “If you want to build a career in academia, build networks, find collaborators, make your work known, you need to be in these spaces,” Nair says.Students with mobility conditions, depression, social anxiety, chronic fatigue, and other challenges celebrated the changes, too.Washington believes the pandemic generated greater empathy for people with disabilities, as everyone struggled with barriers to work and learning. Professors who had been rigid about attendance and deadlines became much more forgiving, and working from home became the norm. “Grace” was the word of the day.Now, three years into a fading pandemic, many students and employees with disabilities are calling on colleges to preserve those practices. They argue that flexibility benefits people without disabilities, too — the student with a sick child who can’t come to class, the adjunct professor who can’t afford to travel, or the international scholar who can’t get a visa.In many places, they’re being met with resistance. Though some professors have continued to record their lectures since returning to in-person learning, others have stopped. Some say universal recording will give students an excuse to skip class; others worry that their words will be weaponized against them by conservative groups.Amanda Kraus, the immediate past president of Ahead, the higher-ed disability workers’ professional group, argues that if professors want to “eliminate as many barriers as possible in a course,” they should proactively post lectures, and caption them, so students can review them before exams, or watch them if they missed class. But, she acknowledges, “there is a lot of pushback” to that idea.Still, Kraus sees signs of progress, particularly in the area of assessment. At the University of Arizona, where she leads the disability-resource center, requests for testing accommodations — including extended time and private rooms — are down 31 percent from before the pandemic.“This signals to us that faculty are making different design choices with assessments, so students don’t need to be accommodated in traditional ways,” Kraus says.Jasmine E. Harris, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says colleges seem more open to remote and hybrid faculty and staff meetings than they were pre-pandemic, too.“There’s a recognition that people can still be productive, they can still be connected” online, Harris says.Even so, she worries that colleges may have missed an opportunity to develop consistent policies around public health, academics, and employment that would eliminate the need for many individualized accommodations.During the height of the pandemic, many college administrators imposed masking and remote-attendance requirements on students and employees, in the name of public health. While that top-down approach wasn’t always popular, it provided consistency and protection for people with disabilities, Harris says.Now that we’re past the pandemic’s peak, most colleges have returned to a decentralized model that gives faculty members and administrators broad discretion in setting academic and employment policies. Students and employees who feel unsafe attending class or a meeting, or can’t make it because of their disability, must again seek individual accommodations.“We’re really back to where we were” pre-pandemic, Harris says.But she sees one key difference: When a person with a disability asks to attend class or a meeting remotely, or requests recorded lectures, the response from the college can no longer be: “We don’t do that” or “we’ve never done that before.”A Rise In ActivismIn the widespread rush to “return to normal,” some faculty members with disabilities are feeling left behind. Though many continue to work remotely, at least part-time, most conferences have returned to an in-person format. To Nicole Schroeder, a postdoctoral fellow at Kean University who studies the history of disability in America, it feels like “a rubber band that snapped back.”Nair agrees. “It’s frightening to see how quickly academia has pivoted,” she says.“The speed with which people have forgotten all the pandemic access gains is a sign of how little disability matters to academia,” she says. “I shouldn’t be surprised — I’m a historian. But I am in some ways heartbroken by the way it’s gone.”While there are faculty members who are fighting to preserve those gains, Schroeder worries that “most are early career scholars who lack the power and privilege to enact meaningful change.”But if faculty members with disabilities are feeling demoralized by the recent backsliding in access, some students seem energized by it.Activism by students with disabilities surged during the early days of the pandemic as they spoke up about the challenges and risks they faced and formed groups to advocate for their needs. As the pandemic recedes, many of these groups are pushing back against a “return to normal.”“Disabled students are paying for their education, so shouldn’t we have the right to know how best that education is given to us?” says Quinn O’Connor, a co-founder of the Disabled Student Union at the University of California at Los Angeles, who graduated in 2022.That winter, O’Connor and students with disabilities at UCLA took part in a 16-day sit-in outside the chancellor’s office to demand a remote-learning option for all classes. It ended with the administration agreeing to endorse such “dual modality” to the Academic Senate, among other commitments.Following the sit-in, the Academic Senate signed off on a letter encouraging faculty members to make recordings and livestreams available to students absent because of Covid. But a remote option still isn’t available to all students.The pandemic has also amplified calls for colleges to create disability cultural centers — physical spaces where students can celebrate their culture and promote justice for people with disabilities.Disability cultural centers, which are modeled after centers focused on race and ethnicity, have been around since the early 1990s, when the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities established the first one shortly after passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act. But they have become more common in recent years, as a generation of students raised under the ADA has ascended to college.Today, there are at least 11 disability cultural centers in existence, and a dozen more under development.While disability-resource centers can sometimes feel transactional, disability cultural centers are all about relationships, says Elizabeth Anh Thomson, who interviewed students at one center for a Ph.D. dissertation. Student-created and sometimes student-run, they provide “a sense of community that is integral to our academic success,” says Thomson, who now directs the office of equity, diversity, and intercultural programs at the University of Minnesota at Morris.The centers also provide a place where students can unpack their experiences with discrimination and confront their own internalized ableism, Thomson and other advocates say.“For so long, disability has been seen as a negative or sad identity,” says Javin D’Souza, a graduate assistant at the Disability Cultural Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “Disability cultural centers reframe it as a positive identity, one you can be proud of.”For students, that internal transformation can take time, says D’Souza, who speaks from personal experience. Even now, as an incoming Ph.D. candidate in disability studies, D’Souza is uncomfortable asking for an extension on an assignment or a day off.“There’s something about how I’ve been socialized that I feel ‘less than,’” says D’Souza, who has Tourette’s syndrome and also identifies as neurodivergent. “I’m still unlearning that ableism.”Alumni are also becoming more engaged with issues of disability, particularly mental health. At Yale, alumni and current students are suing the university over its policies for medical leaves of absence. The lawsuit accuses Yale of pressuring students with mental-health challenges to leave college (Yale has updated its policies since the lawsuit was filed, but the plaintiffs say more changes are needed).Complaints about college withdrawal and reinstatement policies aren’t new — at Yale, or elsewhere. But in the past, the resistance has been spurred by students, says Rishi Mirchandani, who graduated from Yale in 2019 and is a founder of Elis for Rachael, a group of alumni, students, friends, and family of a student who struggled with Yale’s restrictive leave policies and died by suicide in 2021. Elis for Rachael is party to the lawsuit, and by making their voices heard, Mirchandani says, alumni are ensuring that the advocacy doesn’t end when its leaders’ graduate.“Students are transient; alumni are in a more stable position,” says Mirchandani, who also went through a difficult withdrawal and reinstatement process when he experienced a mental-health crisis at Yale. “We are in this for the long haul.”“When you are at the lowest points in your life, the way people treat you — good or bad — is something you never forget,” he says.Long CovidAnother legacy of the pandemic is long Covid — a constellation of symptoms lasting weeks or months after the initial infection that can have a profound effect on a person’s academic career.The Education Department has said long-term Covid can qualify as a disability under federal law, issuing guidance that underscores colleges’ obligations to accommodate students whose symptoms substantially limit a major life activity. Other agencies have made similar statements regarding employees.But few “long haulers” have come forward to seek accommodations from colleges, according to Jane Jarrow, a consultant and expert on disability in higher education who is leading a 32-member task force aimed at helping colleges identify and serve students and employees dealing with the lingering effects of the virus.“We know they’re out there — they’re just not being identified,” Jarrow says.Estimates from a survey of the general public by the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics suggest that roughly one in five individuals who contract the virus experiences longer-term cognitive and/or physical symptoms. Statistically speaking, long Covid is probably more common among faculty members than students, who tend to be younger than their professors.One recent study, by George Washington University, found that over a third of students, faculty, and staff members still had symptoms a month after they tested positive for Covid.Long haulers on college campuses are underidentified at least partly because the symptoms of long Covid vary widely — from difficulty thinking or concentrating (sometimes referred to as “brain fog”), to shortness of breath, to mood changes — and can easily be mistaken for another condition. There’s no medical consensus on how to diagnose long Covid, and some sufferers aren’t even aware they had an infection.Colleges aren’t doing much to educate students, faculty, and staff members about the condition either, a survey conducted by members of Jarrow’s task force in July and August 2022 showed. It found that three quarters of disability-services offices had yet to provide any communication or guidance to their campus communities on supporting students with long Covid.In an effort to build awareness about long Covid and the availability of accommodations for those affected by it, the task force has created a series of videos about the condition, which colleges can share with students, service providers, and faculty and staff. It has also produced a guide for disability-service providers on how to screen students for symptoms of long Covid and determine which adjustments are appropriate.Kimberley Bassi-Cook, director of disability services at Seton Hall University, says she uses an intake form created for people who’ve had concussions to interview students reporting brain fog and other cognitive symptoms of long Covid, to help gauge which supports they might need.A student who has trouble focusing during long classes might be offered someone to help them take notes, for example, while a student struggling with word retrieval might get extended time on tests.“It’s tailored to what the symptoms are and how they change over time,” says Bassi-Cook.Most of the time, people with long Covid won’t have a formal diagnosis, so institutions will need to be flexible about medical documentation and rely heavily on the intake interview to determine whether their condition constitutes a disability, Jarrow says.At Vermont Technical College, Robin Goodall, coordinator of disability services, asks students who come into her office what’s changed in their lives — are there things they can no longer do that used to come easily? If she suspects long Covid, she sends them to their doctor for the documentation her college requires.Two students have qualified so far: The first, a forestry student experiencing fatigue and cardiac problems, was given a stool to sit on during outdoor labs, and recordings of the labs she couldn’t attend. The second, a student with headaches and brain fog, got software to record lectures, so she has backup if her attention drifts.To reach students who don’t consider themselves disabled, or don’t realize they qualify for accommodations, disability-services offices will need to be more proactive than they’re accustomed to, Jarrow says.“We’ve always waited for students to come to us. These students need us to be more intrusive.”Goodall says she has started asking faculty members to refer students who aren’t performing as well as they used to, who seem changed by the pandemic.“I say, ‘You guys know your students best, and you know what they were like in the Before Times,’” Goodall says. “‘Now, if they seem different, send them to me.’”A Final WordDisability is not a static social construct. Higher education’s collective understanding of what disability means, who is disabled, and how people with disabilities should be included has evolved over time and will continue to evolve.In the 50 years since the passage of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, colleges have experienced both considerable growth and significant shifts in their populations with disabilities, stretching and adapting to meet their needs. They have watched as the internet and other technologies exploded in ways that have sometimes helped, and sometimes hindered, access. And they have lived through a pandemic that has challenged the sacrosanctity of in-person learning and work.The past five decades have also seen a growing interest in principles of universal design, in campus construction as well as pedagogy. Campus architects are designing facilities with an eye toward eliminating barriers up front, and professors are offering students options for how they can demonstrate mastery of content.On college campuses today, there is a growing appreciation for the different perspectives and strengths that people with disabilities bring to higher education, and a corresponding push for leaders to include disability in their broader diversity efforts. Yet higher ed continues to grapple with ableism, and many students, faculty, and staff members with disabilities still report feelings of isolation and exclusion.In the years to come, colleges will likely see continued growth in the number of students, faculty, and staff members with disabilities. Many of them will have “invisible disabilities,” including mental-health disorders and chronic diseases. To meet the needs of this growing and diverse population, colleges will need to make digital accessibility part of their strategic planning and prepare for future disruptions to learning — be it a pandemic, natural disaster, or another crisis. They’ll need to hold vendors accountable for providing accessible technology, and better train faculty and staff members in how to create accessible content.Colleges must also examine policies and practices that can unintentionally exclude people with disabilities from academe or dampen their chances of success in it — things like daylong faculty interviews, in-person-only conferences, rigid requirements for medical documentation of disability, and strict attendance policies. Colleges must hire more faculty and staff members with disabilities and find ways to make it less stigmatizing for them to seek accommodations. And they must continue to wrestle with a question that the pandemic brought into sharp focus: Is in-person attendance essential, and if so, when?“We have to think about what education is offering, what is the ‘essential function,’” says Jasmine E. Harris of the University of Pennsylvania, borrowing a term from disability law. “No one wants to answer that question.” But if higher ed ignores it now, she says, “in the next national emergency, we are still going to have to answer it.”

The Accessible Campus

Supporting students, faculty, and staff with disabilities

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