Accommodations Denied
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Nan
Hey everybody, we are back!
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Nan
Welcome to Collegeland, Season 2. I’m Nan Enstad, in Madison, Wisconsin.
Lisa
And I’m Lisa Levenstein, in Greensboro, North Carolina. This season, we’re going to be examining issues related to the work that goes on at campuses across the country. We’ll visit LGBTQ centers and police offices, tribal colleges, and historically black colleges and universities.
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But today, we’re starting back on campus, where we all keep being told that things should be “back to normal”
News clip 1
Millions of students return to campus this fall for the in-person college experience...
News clip 2
What a difference a year makes: sidewalks packed with students, and campus events have made a return… “there’s been a lot of events and stuff…”
Nan
Of course, this “return to normal” ignores the fact that we are still very much in the middle of a pandemic. And college campuses have been ground zero for the continued debate on what COVID-19 means for our everyday lives and how colleges and universities safeguard students and employees—or fail to.
Aimi (tape)
We’re told that we have to do certain things in order for students to get like a full campus experience. And those things involve putting our lives on the line. I think that the feeling that comes with living in that kind of structure is, “is my labor and my life worth less somehow than students getting to go to a concert on campus?”
Nan
That’s Aimi Hamraie, a professor and disability activist. Aimi is affiliated with a group of disabled and allied faculty called the Accessible Campus Action Alliance. They came together in the summer of 2020 when campuses were planning to fully open that fall.
And it’s important to remember that many faculty and staff who are dealing with this stuff can’t speak up—they’re untenured, they’re adjunct, or they just fear retaliation. So this group worked collectively but anonymously to protect people and also create what essentially became the foundation for efforts by disability rights activists around the country within their own universities. They wrote a statement called “Beyond High Risk.” You might not have heard of it til now, but the group had a significant impact in 2020.
But today, a year later, all of their work and knowledge seems to have just…evaporated from administrative decision making. The ability of faculty to request remote teaching is basically gone. People who are asking for these kinds of accommodations—which, to state the obvious, we were all using just last semester—are being systematically denied or ignored.
Lisa
Right! And if you’ve been following this in the news at all, some places, like Cornell University, have seemed to say that their policy—like, their actual, stated policy—is to deny all accommodation requests and force people to be back in the classroom. And other places seem to be following their lead. Just last week in Georgia—things are also really a mess there—a professor filed a federal complaint against having his accommodations denied.
Nan
Yep, this has become the playbook EVERYWHERE: deny accommodations and celebrate being back to so-called “normal.” Here in Wisconsin, our System President is bragging about being over 90% in-person at several UW schools across the state. So if you are saying that, then what you’re really saying is that those schools are not approving ANY accommodation requests.
And, you know, people are just trying to find ways to do their jobs without putting themselves or the people they love and care for at risk. Folks with kids too young to be vaccinated, or with older parents who live with them or that they care for, and, you know, people who have underlying conditions or disabilities that put them at heightened risk of severe disease or death from COVID.
And when you think about the people in all those categories—it’s a lot of people!
Lisa
It’s so many people! And of course I agree that they should have safe working conditions. But honestly, I personally find teaching is better in person. I find that I get a better sense of who students are when I’m with them in the classroom. You know, it just feels more dynamic, warmer, and just kind of better to be in person than on Zoom.
And most of my students seem to agree. I talked with students in my grad seminar the other day and out of 12 students, only one said they preferred Zoom.
Nan
Yeah, Lisa, I prefer teaching in person too. But what about that one student…?
Lisa
Well, what about them? If only one person wants to Zoom, does that mean the rest of us should, what? Stay home?
Nan
Well, why are those are the only two options? You know, after talking to Aimi and some other professors associated with the Accessible Campus Action Alliance, I’m starting to see that there might be other ways to think about this. But let me begin by introducing the people I spoke with. You’ve already heard from Aimi…
Aimi
My name is Aimi Hamraie. I teach at Vanderbilt University and I direct the Critical Design Lab.
Nan
And Bess and Jonathan were also on the call.
Bess
I'm Bess Williamson. I'm an Associate Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Jonathan
And I’m Jonathan Sterne. I'm a Professor of Communication Studies and some other stuff at McGill University.
Nan
These folks are each really accomplished teachers and scholars.
So I asked them to help me understand the scope of the issues—but first I wanted to know how the Accessible Campus Action Alliance came about and how they got involved.
Aimi
Some of the problems that needed to be addressed in that moment were that the CDC had released guidelines for who was in a high-risk category for COVID and many universities, they were using those categories to determine whether or not people were able to get accommodations for remote teaching or work or participation.
And it felt important from the perspective of our field disability studies to note that this was a collective problem. And it wasn't just about these specific high-risk categories that were constantly changing. People were experiencing a lot of barriers in the accommodations process, and many people were applying for accommodations for the first time because they hadn't been in this situation before. And so it felt important to share what we knew from our own research on accessibility to kind of help people through that and come up with some guiding values and practices.
Jonathan
I wrote to the group last spring when McGill announced that it was gonna be back on campus in the fall despite the fact no one that no one could possibly know how the pandemic was going to unfold.
And at that time Canada was quite far behind the US in vaccination, as well. So like I was both high risk and unvaccinated. You know, that’s why I joined but if you say what motivated me to join, if I had to pick like one word, it would be anger, specifically anger at how institutions are treating people with disabilities and people around people with disabilities. I mean, one of the standard arguments in disability studies, which I know we'll get to later, is that disability is environmentally produced, and I'd say the same thing with something like risk and I mean, certainly that's what we're seeing in the United States and some other places.
Bess
And many of the ways that workplace accommodations are set up in the US and elsewhere is that they focus on just an individual person. If we know anything about this pandemic, it's that a person is not isolated in their experience or their risk for COVID and its effects.
So, you know, for people who live in households who have partners or children who might be at risk, right? So you might not be asking for accommodations based on your own medically-defined risk, but because of your community or because of your household.
Right? So we were asked in this time to make a tremendous shift in our pedagogy, to be generous, to understand what students were going through. And I think that's all of our motivation, but there was little concern about, how, what, what did faculty need? Um, and I was actually among, I think, many, many faculty who found myself asking for accommodations for the very first time.
Honestly I would not put myself so much in the category of like angry, but just sort of exasperated that we have these technologies, they have been used by disabled people. Um, disabled people have requested them from their institutions and been denied in many cases.
In addition to that, I would say that the attention that universities give to disability tends to be focused on students rather than employees and faculty.
Lisa
That’s so interesting because honestly, I’ve been teaching for two decades, and over that time I’ve really seen quite a huge stride in how universities are making space for students with disabilities. But I honestly haven’t thought that much about how far behind we are with faculty and staff.
Nan
Yeah, that was eye-opening to me, too. And now with the pandemic, when you start to think about who this affects...the category expands and goes beyond people who identify as “disabled.” I asked the group about that.
Nan
You're not, just advocating for, you know, people with disabilities, right? You're really talking about people who are adjunct and untenured; you're talking about BIPOC people, really thinking about vulnerability, I thought in a really interesting way. And so you say treating vulnerability as a universal condition made worse by the pandemic rather than an individual problem offers clear directives for creating university policies informed by care, rather than fear of financial losses.
I like want to just put that on a billboard, you know, on my campus. Um, but I just want, I wanted to ask you to talk to me about that and like what, what is this move with vulnerability? And can you explain kind of where this comes from and what, what you mean by that
Bess
I think many employees experienced, a moment of their personal lives becoming more, even more entwined with their work lives than had previously been the case. Right. And, and in that moment, it's revealed the ways in which our institutions often don't care about that, those personal lives, right. About who we live with, about who we're caring for.
You're hearing messages from your university about what is safe, when you know, that does not align with your own sense of safety. That creates a disconnect and when it comes to care and we're, you know, the, the idea that this pandemic has occurred, and again, and again, we hear these sort of benchmarks of achievement and productivity, rather than an awareness of, you know, loss, of tragedy, of fear that, you know, I think we'll be living with for a long time.
Aimi
We all need to know that our institutions have regard for our lives and our safety and that they recognize the stress and the trauma of the pandemic. For students and for faculty and staff especially for staff who are just like on the front lines all the time, care should be a governing ethic of institutions. If they also want people to have faith in them to feel safe and to want to put in the effort to like foster a collective experience.
Nan
Yeah, well, and it gets back to Jonathan's point about environment, because if you know these places where cases are really high, if they have really low vaccination rates, then in what way is that normal? Right? Like we're just really back. Some campuses are really back exactly where we were last year, except now they're in person.
Jonathan
Yeah, no I think that's really bizarre. I mean, so there's really two words we're working with here. One is care and the other is vulnerability. And I’d add a third one, which is dependency. And one of the things that's really made clear in a lot of writing about disability, both by like activists and sort of life-writing and in the scholarship, is that vulnerability and dependency are often like stigmatized conditions, like you need help. But of course, all it is is really certain kinds of vulnerabilities or dependencies are sort of called out and made apparent, whereas others, like say needing stairs to go up into a building, are seen as like somehow not needing help. This is one of the things people with chronic illnesses already knew is that dependency is just a part of life.
And it's something that institutions are not very good at. Our higher ed institutions of higher education historically have not been very good at dealing with, but it's absolutely necessary.
You know, to turn Aimi's Aimi's suggestion around though, like we need institutions that express some care or value. What does it mean when that doesn't happen, right? Like you, you read stuff about epidemics of burnout and things like that, but that's psychologies and individualizes the problem again, rather than saying there's this like broad structural issue of when, you know, it's, it's more about something like the bottom line, which, you know, it's not nothing; if the institution doesn't have money, it can’t operate. I understand that, but even that’s structural. Like, it's not an accident that for instance, Cornell was the one that drew attention for refusing to accommodate anybody this fall. I don't know if that policy has stood up or not, but I don't think it's an accident given that it's, you know, a, a private school that really does depend well, it's a mixed public/private school, but it really does depend on that tuition money.
Nan
Right. I wonder if, uh, if Aimi or Bess, if you have anything you want to say about the Cornell situation. Cause that was such a shocking moment when Cornell basically said we're not going to do any accommodations.
Aimi
Yeah, so it's not just Cornell. Pretty much everyone I've talked to has been refused remote accommodations this year. I don’t know what is motivating it, but there seems to have been a broad declaration that it's an unreasonable accommodation to allow people to teach remotely or hybrid.
Bess
The question of whether an essential function of college teaching is in-person was largely challenged by our ability to operate last year and keep, you know, the vast majority of students in degree granting programs, right? Yes, many opted out, but there's so many reasons why students opted out last year, right? It was not solely because of remote access.
Nan
Yeah, I just gotta say, like, my institution has been pushing people to create online classes for about a decade because they're lucrative. And so, you know, then we all went online and now people can't get accommodations to teach online. Right? Unless they already had a class that had been an online class before COVID so it's, it's just not credible, that everybody has to be teaching in person.
You know, maybe it's a problem with the word accommodation? I don't know. Like it's something sort of friendly that they could do like, “oh, excuse me. Can I sit here?” “Oh, sure. You can sit here. I can move over.” Instead of like something that they're required by law to do, and this feels to me like there's some real slippage going on about this.
Aimi
Yeah, definitely. You know, one of the debates I would say in our field is about the value of a concept of accommodation, because it implies that we are bringing people who are marginalized into the kind of majority system by making small adaptations, rather than actually changing the system to be more effective.
And so there are so many different experiences with trying to get accommodations from the institutions, whether through HR or through your chair or some other kind of office. And there is a legal mandate about the type of process that is supposed to be followed but the institution is the gatekeeper of that process and determines what is reasonable and unreasonable and there isn't really an appeals process either. So If you're denied, you're denied and you're just sort of out of luck and all of those structural things actually are related to the philosophy of accommodation.
As you say, is kind of this like charitable thing, that is “given” to us rather than something that should just be transforming institutions and that institutions ought to be adopting as like a core value.
Bess
Right, so you can imagine if you're a contingent faculty member, not only are you asking an institution for accommodation who already, you know, disregards your work in a number of different ways, but you're also like you're required to provide medical documentation to an institution that doesn't provide you health insurance.
Jonathan
Yeah, I mean, who feels entitled to ask for something from their institutions, and even the idea that you're asking your institution for a thing is really problematic. You know, this is looping back to the Cornell thing, but the scandal there wasn't the Cornell scandal it’s that there isn't a scandal at every single school.
Everybody is getting refused accommodations. In my case, I put in a request for accommodations and I just haven't heard back. I happened to know someone high-up in HR, wrote to them, and they said, well, “you have to have sympathy for us, because we're understaffed.” And on one level I do, but it's really weird to ask someone to have sympathy for the institution that's like denying their right to exist. Uh, it's a really weird sort of rhetorical maneuver. One of the problems is the, with accommodation is precisely the entire framework that like it again individualizes, you're the problem.
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Lisa
Wow. I had never thought about how problematic it is that institutions require people to prove that they somehow “deserve” accommodations. Not to mention that the very same institutions are denying so many people basic care like health insurance.
Nan
Exactly! I’m still processing what Aimi said about the concept of accommodation, that it implies we’re bringing marginalized people into a majority system rather than changing the system to care for and give access to everyone. I mean, this is literally the messaging in Wisconsin: we’re back to normal and “everyone” is so excited to be back on campus. They say that “students” prefer this on-campus experience. I’m realizing that there’s this constant assertion of a singular norm. Why does there only have to be one norm? Especially when that “norm” literally puts people’s lives at risk?!
Lisa
And when that “norm” was completely abandoned for a year! I’m seeing that we actually have an opportunity now to do something new, to value multiple forms of access and instruction.
Nan
YES! And let’s not forget that the very technologies that made the year online possible were often developed and first used by people with disabilities. They have been figuring out how to participate remotely for years! Long before “remote learning” was a part of the mainstream everyday.
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Bess
You know, we use video conferencing, email, you know, texting, text-based communications for a variety of reasons, but they have always been early adopted by disabled communities. And so for those of us, for example, who work in disability studies, we had many times already attended remote talks, attended talks that had a captioner or attended talks that had a captioner and a sign interpreter and text-based scripts alongside, right?
These were common tools that we were using to bring us together and so it was not so unfamiliar to see our universities using them.
Aimi
Yeah I would say it's true and that a lot of access methods and technologies have been developed by disabled people because institutions have failed to provide them for us. And so, the fact that then those technologies get kind of mass-produced and made available to non-disabled people without that history attached to it gives the impression that those technologies are just like neutral and good but that denial of access isn't highlighted.
And then all of a sudden, when the accommodation is not for non-disabled people when it's now mostly for disabled people, the option is taken away. And a lot of people feel really betrayed by that.
Nan
Lisa, this blew me away. To just dork out for a moment, Aimi is saying that technologies aren’t really neutral, they develop within a history and a politics. And I have NOT been thinking about the role that people with disabilities played in developing the technologies that I now rely on every single day-- and allows us to make this very podcast from halfway across the country! No one acknowledges this.
Lisa
And I can totally understand why this feels like a betrayal. It seems like another example of the university system appropriating techniques and knowledge when it is useful to them, and then just discarding it when all of their priorities change.
Nan
It’s colonizing! What this also points to is how fragile the whole system seems to be. You know, I study food systems, and in food systems, we saw supply chains totally break down because of COVID. And it turns out, maybe not surprisingly, that the same was true for places like university accommodations offices.
Nan
I want to get back to this point about accomodations offices. It seems like one thing that’s happening now is that COVID is just making them totally break down. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.
Bess
I appreciate that metaphor of the supply chain and I think in particular, this idea, you know, it mirrors so many operations of our lives where we kind of shift to like an emergency operation. And then it's like, when do you shift back?
And in fact, do you shift back, right? Have you, have you adopted elements? And I think in many cases, my institution included — there was literally a different form for accommodations during COVID because so many people were, were being accommodated. And because honestly, I mean, my school--I've got to give them credit--did adopt a more generous approach to accommodations where childcare was included, where, you know, age alone was considered a risk category; it didn't have to be age plus medical illness. And so then one day this fall, a couple of weeks ago, we just got an email saying “that policy is over, and now we're back to the same policy as before.” So, it really is a kind of switch on and off, you know. So now the question is, is there anything we could do to edit those, to incorporate some of what we've learned?
Jonathan
I do think our institutions, like when you talk about supply chains and logistics, there is a way that they're more brittle. Like I'm always struck. My parents lived through the Great Depression and then World War II. And it's like, after 18 months of interruption, you're saying that like everything from junior colleges to like posh universities cannot tolerate, after 18 months? And so like the really like incredible push to snap back, you know, like Bess’s the story of just one day an email shows up saying, “okay, that's all over” is really quite striking.
The other thing I was seeing even before the return to campus is like a collective mental health crisis among faculty. And again, this is all levels from like very senior full professors to contingent faculty and graduate students and undergrads, and it's probably true with staff as well. So like, it's made worse by the way that universities have responded to the situation, and the degree to which even when they were calling for flexibility last year, they weren't really fully clued into the personal cost for faculty and staff.
You know, and speaking for myself, it was the most challenging teaching year of my life, but also one of the most rewarding, right? Like, multiple things can be true. But I think the result is like we're facing now, I think a collective mental health crisis that even if the pandemic were to end in six months or in a year—and I'm not sure it will given the global rates of vaccination— even if that were to be the case, we'll be dealing with the ramifications of this for many years.
Lisa
Okay, can we pause here for a second?
Nan
Of course!
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Lisa
Because, this talk of a mental health crisis just really resonates with me and I fear that people in higher education with the power to address it are just giving it lip service right now. A few days ago, I received a message from our university administration that began by informing us that mental health is a big problem with students and faculty, as if we didn’t know this. And get what they’re doing to address the problem: they are requiring MULTIPLE faculty members in each department to attend an 8-hour training, 6 hours in person, over 2 days, to train them to become mental health responders. As if faculty themselves weren't already struggling with mental health issues, overwork, having to schedule an additional 8 hours of uncompensated time—and then be on the front lines of the mental health crisis for others—how is THIS the plan? I know how it’s the plan. It’s the plan because it doesn’t require any MONEY, it's something being added to faculty's responsibilities so the university can claim they did something to help address the mental health crisis. Meanwhile, most of our faculty don't have health insurance because they are adjuncts. And we are undergoing a budget cut that is requiring us to cut the salaries of those who make the least.
Nan
Wow, Lisa. That's incredible and it speaks so loudly to the mental health crisis that Jonanthan named, and the seeming inability of many campuses to support both students AND workers at the same time.
And if we could zoom out for just a second, there’s, like, this expectation that we all should be fine. Sure, faculty can take on becoming mental health ambassadors. Right now! And if we’re not fine, it’s like a personal failure, not just a matter of the range of human experience and capacity. It’s part of a deep historical legacy about disability and eugenics and even what it means to be human.
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Nan
So I wanted to return to vulnerability, and Jonathan, in your writing, you say that impairment is a fundamental dimension of human experience. And I wonder if I could just ask you to explain what you mean by that.
Jonathan
Well, um, let me start by, by saying what I don't mean, which is everybody's impaired or everybody's going to become impaired because that isn't actually accurate. But if you look at the frequency and quality of impairments that people live with and either live with for their whole lives or acquire later on, it is a very, very large proportion of humanity.
Uh, whether that's because people have lived very long or because people don't live very long and are in very dangerous settings. And so it is often written about and sorta thought about as an exception or something unusual and I think that this is one of the, one of the big contributions of disability studies is just this shift in perspective.
Aimi
Disability studies is really influenced by the legacy of eugenics and something that feels important as we think about the pandemic and institutional responses to it as to really understand how eugenic thinking, uh, still continues to pervade our calculations. And you know, of course, eugenics was not only about the practice of sterilization.It was also about valuing bodies that are not dependent or that are contributing to the economy in certain prescribed ways, um, and devaluing others. And, you know, when we hear someone say something like, oh, well, we're all gonna get COVID eventually. Um, like we need to understand that that is throwing disabled people and, um, chronically ill people under the bus and that there are so many things that we can be doing to prevent that from happening or, um, or not using that assumed inevitability to shape policy.
Nan
Well this has been fantastic, we’ve covered so much ground and I’ve learned a lot, and I just want to make sure I have time to ask you, what would success look like or what would it include, going forward?
Bess
I can answer an a in a really, really practical way, you know, which is just to say distributing support for accessible technologies and approaches into all aspects of a year round functioning of university.
Jonathan
I think so there's sort of two levels of success. There's like sort of what Bess was talking about, which is, I think, sort of workaday success and then there's utopic success. Utopically, like it's about redesigning education and redesigning our institutions from the ground up that make accessibility everybody's responsibility.
And that, you know, just as now around climate change, we're starting to talk about ecological significance of a project, not at the end, but at the planning stage, like why isn't disability that. Why aren't people with disabilities on every university committee that makes any decisions with respect to accessibility or space or environment? Well, I mean, one reason is there aren't enough people with disabilities in positions in universities who could do that, um, which, you know, goes back to sort of the politics of exclusion and things like that. But in a utopic setting, I mean, you're really talking about building institutions around ideas like justice and fairness.
Aimi
I kind of think that maybe, you know, universities as they are currently configured would have to be completely reconfigured. I'm not sure that it's possible to achieve like a utopian vision of what we would want for the university, because already so many people are excluded, um, from the very structure of higher education.
But there are things I think, on a practical level, that we can do that other folks have talked about already, like allowing hybrid or online teaching during the pandemic. Um, we know that that's possible. I don't think it would have hurt to allow it for one more year, um, just to keep people safe and inspire some more confidence in, um, how the systems are working.
Lisa
Nan, it seems like the collective are asking us to think really seriously about what it would mean to structure a university that affirms that we all experience dependency and vulnerability. Is that asking too much?
Nan
You know Lisa, ever since we started working on this episode, I’ve been thinking back to the first interview I ever did—I was 12 years old and I interviewed a woman who was blind for a school project. It was a proto-Collegeland moment for me!
I went to her apartment-And she showed me around her apartment and all of her systems in the kitchen, that enabled her to know where everything was, with her clothes, a laundry machine with braille labels on the dials. So cool. She impressed upon me that in her apartment, she was blind, but she wasn’t disabled-- she was able to do everything I could do at home. We sat in her living room and I took notes, and as we sat there it got dark. It was November in Minnesota and it gets dark at 4:30! We got done and she got up and walked toward the doorway, and I’m like-- ‘um, I can’t see….It got dark.’ And she’s like, “oh, I’m sorry!” and she turned on a light for me. And a light went on in my 12-year old head too!-- in her space, HER needs were the norm and I needed a light so I didn’t trip over her furniture. She HAD a light so she could accommodate her sighted friends.
We can choose to have a built environment that works for the majority and renders a minority disabled or we can have multiple ways to access our classrooms, our meetings, our websites.
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Lisa
Nan, thank you so much for sharing that story, and this interview. It’s so clear to me now that there HAVE to be multiple ways to approach accessibility on campus, even—or especially!—if it’s only for that one person in my grad seminar. Because, as we know, it’s not *just* for that person. It’s for all of us. It makes our whole university better.
Nan
Exactly. And it’s about respecting the people who study these issues and LIVE them. We don’t have to invent how to do this through millions of hours of meetings by some administratively appointmented subcommittee. The knowledge is RIGHT HERE in our colleges and universities RIGHT NOW. We just have to do a better job listening to people with disabilities . And hope that they will still be willing to answer that call.
Credits
Collegeland is produced by Craig Eley (EE-lee) and Jade Iseri (EYE-siri) Ramos (RAH-mos). Danyel Ferrari (DaeN-YEHL fer-AH-ree) is our researcher and publicist. Our theme music is by Josh Wilson. And the show is hosted by me, Nan Ensted, along with Lisa Levenstein.
Special thanks to the Accessible Campus Action Alliance. We have a link to their full statement on our website—and lots of other information about our guests today. Check it out at collegeland pod dot com. A full transcript of this show is also available on our website.
A special thanks to and the North Carolina Humanities Council and the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies for their support.
We’re really excited about this season of Collegeland, and hope you are, too. If you made it this far, we would be so grateful if you could take a second to leave us a review and tell a friend about the show.
See you next time, in Collegeland.