Faculty, staff, and students with disabilities constantly have to negotiate when and if to disclose their disability status and whether or not to request accommodations. In this episode, Kat Macfarlane joins us to discuss the ADA and the experiences people with disabilities have in academia, including the burdens associated with accommodation requests.
Kat is a law professor at Southern University Law Center. She is a disability rights advocate, chairs the American Association of Law School Section on Disability Law, and co-founded an affinity group for disabled law professors and allies. Her work is published in the Fordham Law Review, the Alabama Law Review and Yale Law Journal Forum and many other journals.
Shownotes
- Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
- Twitter thread that prompted this podcast
- Katherine A. Macfarlane, Disability Without Documentation, 90 Fordham L. Rev. 59 (2021). Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol90/iss1/2
- Ms. JD Blog Series
- Dorfman, D. (2019). Fear of the disability con: perceptions of fraud and special rights discourse. Law & Society Review, 53(4), 1051-1091.
- Studies on laptops and notetaking:
- Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological science, 25(6), 1159-1168.
- Morehead, K., Dunlosky, J., & Rawson, K. A. (2019). How much mightier is the pen than the keyboard for note-taking? A replication and extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014). Educational Psychology Review, 31(3), 753-780.
- Aguilar-Roca, N. M., Williams, A. E., & O’Dowd, D. K. (2012). The impact of laptop-free zones on student performance and attitudes in large lectures. Computers & Education, 59(4), 1300-1308.
- Artz, Benjamin and Johnson, Marianne and Robson, Denise and Taengnoi, Sarinda, Note-Taking in the Digital Age: Evidence from Classroom Random Control Trials (September 13, 2017).
- Bui, D. C., Myerson, J., & Hale, S. (2013). Note-taking with computers: Exploring alternative strategies for improved recall. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(2), 299.
- Carter, S. P., Greenberg, K., & Walker, M. S. (2017). The impact of computer usage on academic performance: Evidence from a randomized trial at the United States Military Academy. Economics of Education Review, 56, 118-132.
- Hembrooke, H., & Gay, G. (2003). The laptop and the lecture: The effects of multitasking in learning environments. Journal of computing in higher education, 15(1), 46-64.
- Lang, James M. “The Distracted Classroom.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. March 13, 2017.
- Patterson, R. W., & Patterson, R. M. (2017). Computers and productivity: Evidence from laptop use in the college classroom. Economics of Education Review, 57, 66-79.
- Ravizza, S. M., Uitvlugt, M. G., & Fenn, K. M. (2017). Logged in and zoned out: How laptop internet use relates to classroom learning. Psychological science, 28(2), 171-180.
- Sana, F., Weston, T., & Cepeda, N. J. (2013). Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers. Computers & Education, 62, 24-31.
- Accessing Higher Ground Conference
- Mya on TikTok
Transcript
John: Faculty, staff, and students with disabilities constantly have to negotiate when and if to disclose their disability status and whether or not to request accommodations. In this episode we get a primer on the ADA and discuss the experiences people with disabilities have in academia, including the burdens associated with accommodation requests.
[MUSIC]
John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
[MUSIC]
Rebecca: Our guest today is Kat McFarlane, a law professor at Southern University Law Center. She is a disability rights advocate, chairs the American Association of Law School Section on Disability Law, and co-founded an affinity group for disabled law professors and allies. Her work is published in the Fordham Law Review, the Alabama Law Review and Yale Law Journal Forum and many other journals. Welcome, Kat.
Kat: Hi, thanks for having me.
John: Today’s teas are… Kat, are you drinking tea?
Kat: You know, I have an English grandmother, who… may she rest in peace… would be embarrassed to learn that her granddaughter is drinking Perrier today. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: Don’t worry, we’ve got you. We’ve got you. I have a tea that… I can’t remember what’s in my cup.
John: But there is a tea bag this time, right?
Rebecca: Yeah, there’s actual tea. I made a pot of tea. But I made it a while ago, and now I can’t remember what it is. It’s a black tea of some sort. I’m gonna have to go with that today, John. I really have no idea. [LAUGHTER]
John: And I have Twinings Christmas tea.
Rebecca: Oh, I had some of that earlier. So we invited you here today to discuss what it means to be disabled in higher education as both a student and as a faculty or staff member. You’ve written extensively about this subject in journal articles like “Disability Without Documentation,” and in your blog series for Ms. JD, and on Twitter. And in these spaces, you’ve identified yourself as a person with disabilities. Would you like to share a little more about that before we get started?
Kat: Yeah, absolutely. So I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis when I was 13 months old. So I’ve had RA, an autoimmune disease, my entire life, and I’ve been on very strong immunosuppressants my entire life. So, RA’s a joint disease… that alone makes me disabled but combined with the immunosuppressants I’m disabled in a variety of ways. Most of my disabilities play out as mobility impairments. However, unless you know what you’re looking for, or it happens to be a quite terrible day for me, in which I’m flaring, you’d likely wouldn’t know that I’m disabled. And I spent most of my life until my early 30s, being quite ashamed of what I was going through physically, really resisting the label of a person with disabilities. And no one really knew to the point where when I finally started talking and writing about it, friends from high school were shocked to learn what that’s an essential part of who I am.
John: To set the groundwork for the discussion, c ould you provide a bit of an overview of the Americans with Disabilities Act?
Kat: Sure, the ADA, as it’s referred to in legal circles, was passed in 1990. It’s a piece of civil rights legislation, and it was a result of decades of activism by allies, but mostly by people with disabilities themselves. And so it was intended to make all aspects of American life open to people with disabilities. So that includes employment, things like airplanes, public buildings, and what we’re going to talk about today, places of higher education. So one important thing that the ADA does, it views disability through what we call the social model. So we don’t think of people with disabilities as broken or in need of fixing, they exist outside of any kind of medical model or diagnosis, rather, the ADA and the social model looks at spaces and barriers. And the goal is to remove them so that everyone, including people with disabilities, can find space to exist equally alongside their non disabled peers. The ADA has a pretty specific definition of disability. And I say specific, it’s what we use legally, but it’s meant to incorporate all kinds of disability. So the working definition that we use is a disability under the ADA is a mental or physical impairment that substantially limits a major life activity. So my RA is a disability under the ADA. If you’re high risk for COVID because of asthma, you are disabled under the ADA, which of course has become very, very relevant over the last year and a half.
Rebecca: In academia, the primary way we often talk about disability, kind of unfortunately, is through the lens of accommodations. Can you talk a little bit about accommodations, and maybe also how that doesn’t always follow the social model. [LAUGHTER]
Kat: Accommodations, the way to think about them, are adjustments that make the learning environment so no one’s getting an advantage through an accommodation. And oftentimes, people have to ask for accommodations for things that really should be in place already. So an accommodation might mean installing an extra wheelchair ramp, there should already be a wheelchair ramp into any place of public education, maybe providing material in Braille, allowing students to have absences automatically excused to the extent that they need medical treatment related to their disability. And in the context of testing, giving either extra time on a test or something that I always encourage my students to ask for when they deal with panic attacks, for example, to have breaks that are untimed. So when you’re in front of the tests, the clock keeps on running, but to the extent there’s something you’re dealing with physically, maybe the clock for your break is unlimited. Things like accessible bathrooms are not accommodations. Schools, public buildings (private schools as well), have to have accessible bathrooms in there, you shouldn’t have to wait for a person with disabilities to arrive on campus. Same thing with service dogs, no one that has a service dog should have to get permission by way of an accommodation, they’re very limited questions that you can ask someone with a service dog. In general, we want to encourage and facilitate people to be able to bring their service dog to any place that they need to get to. So again, I would think of accommodations as fairly straightforward adjustments that facilitate equality. And I say fairly straightforward, because most of them are incredibly cheap. The rare accommodation is expensive, and we think of them in terms of equality. But there’s also limits on them. So you only get a reasonable accommodation. If an accommodation would change the nature of the learning environment, if it would undo a pedagogical purpose for a particular exam, for example, those accommodations don’t have to be granted. The ADA doesn’t say any accommodation whatsoever. It says only those accommodations that are reasonable. And cost does come into play in determining whether an accommodation is or is not reasonable.
John: Many institutions require documentation for disabilities, and that can serve as a barrier. And you wrote about that in your blog earlier. Could you talk a little bit about some of the barriers that are introduced by the requirements for documentation?
Kat: Sure, documentation typically requires a person with a disability to get a doctor to sign off on the fact that they’re disabled. You’re not supposed to have to do this, if you have an obvious disability, a legal rule. However, employers, places of higher education are very reluctant to call any kind of disability obvious. And I say that at the top, because there’s all of this suspicion that surrounds the assertions of people with disabilities make, both about the fact that they are disabled, and the kind of accommodations that they require. So typically, if you’re a student who needs any kind of accommodation, maybe that includes using a laptop in class, I know we’ll talk about that in a few moments, you are likely going to have to go to a doctor’s appointment, get a doctor to examine you to confirm that you’re disabled. And the doctor often has to write, themselves, what sort of accommodations you need, which adds on this additional layer of complexity because, in my case my rheumatologist, obviously never went to law school, doctors I continue to see do not work as law professors. So there’s this very strange requirement that we asked medical doctors to make recommendations about spaces they’ve never been in. The best case scenario: that takes one appointment, the doctor believes you, they sign off. But, what are we doing to people when we require them to get medical documentation of disability? They have to take time off whatever they’re doing… job, usually… school… doctors don’t work on weekends or after hours, they work the same time that classes are held. You have to go to a doctor’s appointment, travel to get there and back. You might not have money for that kind of transportation as a student. Parking at medical facilities is very expensive, gas or transport, If you have to add that on. If you’re in a new city, and you have to see a new doctor, even if your diagnosis was confirmed like me at birth, I’ve often had to provide additional documentation that the chronic and degenerative illness I have, in fact, I still have. I make jokes like, “Oh, is there a cure for RA that I didn’t hear about?” In any event, if you’re in a new city and you’re seeing a new doctor, you’re probably not going to get that form during a first time appointment, right? And I understand that a doctor might want to see you again. But we’re sending students down this very complex, very expensive, very time consuming path. Are their absences excused? Who knows? Another point to make here is that when documentation of disability turns on a health care professional’s assessment of your disability, we are now sending people into a system, medicine, that we know to be racist, and we know to be sexist, and that we know to disbelieve, in particular, women of color’s assertions of their pain. That absolutely crosses over into what doctors think certain demographics are saying and whether they’re to be believed when they make representations about their disability. There’s no uniform documentation form that every single university or grad school or law school uses. So, you might have filled out a one-page form at your undergrad institution and it was relatively straightforward and then have to start all over again once you get to grad school and pay out all this money, just to get, what we’ve just mentioned, was a tool of equality.
Rebecca: So you’re starting to describe, Kat, doesn’t really sound like the social model.
Kat: [LAUGHTER] No, it’s so dependent on medicine. And not everyone with a disability has to have as many interactions with healthcare providers as I do, for example, right? You may use a mobility aid, you may use a wheelchair and have to see a doctor every year or even less frequently. On top of that, the intricacies of your everyday life and what you need help with, what’s difficult, or what’s easy, even the understanding that you absolutely should be in the workplace is something that a doctor often will not understand. And just as we know that there’s an incredible amount of sexism and racism in medicine, ableism [LAUGHTER] is a terrible problem to the point where people in wheelchairs often can’t get into doctors’ offices, because medical spaces aren’t accessible to them. So Rebecca, thank you for mentioning that. It’s a point that’s at the heart of my “Disability Without Documentation” paper. And so not only are we tracking back to an idea that disability only exists if a doctor says it’s there, but we’re also treating a person with disability as someone who has something wrong with them. And you have to go to a doctor because only they will possibly know how you might be able to exist at school or exist in the workplace.
Rebecca: So what other models can we advocate for that would reduce this burden and help institutions move more towards inclusion for students, but also for faculty and staff.
Kat: So, I think every school should audit its accommodation process, look at how many pages accommodations forms are, if they’re more than two, you’re already asking a lot of people with disabilities. If there is a documentation requirement, it should be minimal. Anyone that already has documentation that includes a diagnosis should not be required to get anything new. If someone is discovering that they have a disability, and they’re now in a very intense academic program that requires accommodation that they might have not needed before, if they have to go to a doctor, I think they should be able to go to the Student Health Center and it should be free of charge, and it should be an appointment that students can get after hours. We often speak of our disability services offices as a part of the university that advocates on behalf of students. I’m sure there are places like that. Typically they’re not though, right? They’re offices that accept forms and decide some part of whether students are entitled or not entitled to accommodations, but they don’t then take on any other kind of advocacy role. So as institutes of higher ed, we should think about: Well, who is supporting students? Do they have access to mentors? Are we able to put students and even faculty in touch with other people who have gone through the accommodations process and can give them advice about how to navigate it? And then in turn, is there a feedback loop back to the institution about how to make the process better? I would also assume we all need training about implicit bias, right? But, we often don’t talk about disability in that discussion. There’s this overarching suspicion about people with disabilities. And a friend of mine Doran Dorfman has written an article called “Fear of the Disability Con,” and he describes how the epidemic is Americans’ fear that people with disabilities are faking. That’s statistically what we can measure. People with disabilities don’t fake. There’s so much discrimination that you face as soon as you identify yourself as a person with disabilities that why would you? So, we need to step aside from that model and assume that people are telling the truth. When you assume that people are telling the truth, you have less bureaucracy involved, [LAUGHTER] in your accommodations process, less people need to like double check or fill out paperwork, or even receive or review paperwork to begin with. And then finally, I would say, whenever we’re talking about accommodations, or people with disabilities, we have to speak as though people with disabilities are in the room because they are, right? I’ve sat through so many faculty meetings, where accommodations come up, and students are vilified. At my last institution, someone from the disability services offices came and gave a presentation and the only images of people with disability used were children with disabilities on playgrounds. I countered that with a presentation of my own, but I felt like I didn’t exist in that conversation. It was an invitation to talk about people and to other them. So the way we discuss students with disabilities has to be very different than what we’re doing right now.
John: One of the ways in which disability issues may come up in the classroom is that there are a lot of faculty who will not allow the use of any technology produced in the last couple of centuries in their classroom. How can that serve as a barrier to students with certain types of disabilities?
Kat: Yeah, I have this conversation with law professors, I guess I have this fight. Like every August I’ll tweet something and say: Just a reminder, laptop bans are ablest. And then people debate their merit. When I talk about this, the first thing I say is people are for some reason enamored with these studies about how students learn better if they’re not on a laptop, to which I say: What about all the students with disabilities? What’s the data on their experience when they don’t fit into [LAUGHTER] whatever data set you’ve come up with? “Oh, yeah, I didn’t think about that?” “Well, they’re just a few of them”. Okay, so this is not a perfect study to begin with. Anyway, second, I don’t think professors always understand how complex getting an accommodation is. So let’s walk through a timeline. You’re a freshman, let’s say. You get your syllabus, maybe a week… best practices…[LAUGHTER] right before classes start… maybe the night before, and all of a sudden you see a laptop ban. No way will you ever have enough time to get an accommodation in place that allows you to use a laptop on the first day that you need it, for various reasons. Accommodations require this multi-step evaluation process. And I know of no school that as soon as a student asked for a particular accommodation, they’re, in the interim, granted that. This is something that I’ve advocated for my institution. In the legal context, we would call that a TRO or like a preliminary injunction where you grant relief for a shortened period of time, pending a more fuller evaluation. We don’t do that. We make disabled students sit there and suffer without the accommodations that they likely are going to get. So if you have a laptop and you have a student with a disability who gets that accommodation, what they’re going to have to go through is all that medical documentation loop that I talked about: have meetings with the Office of Disability Services, fill out the forms, wait for the accommodation to be granted. So all that time has been wasted and that student has been sitting in your classroom when they needed a laptop and have had to go without it. So I’ve heard a couple professors come up with their own, like ad hoc solution to this and I haven’t heard one that I’m really on board with yet. So some people say, “Well, if you have a legitimate disability, then I’ll let you use it…” to which I say: “Number one, how are you going to measure that?” That’s interesting, that word legitimate is strange. Number two, no student should have to disclose their disability to you to get what they are entitled to under the law. And again, this is where implicit bias comes into play. We have confidentiality provisions under the ADA, because Congress, we as a country, decided we needed certain aspects of disability to be kept confidential because of the fear of discrimination. So on a one-to-one basis, professors should not just be deciding that students can be forced to disclose their disability. So I think that doesn’t work. Now, let’s say six weeks into the semester, the student finally gets permission to use the laptop, let’s say it’s a seminar class of 12 students, one student’s using a laptop, all of a sudden, you have forced that student to disclose to their classmates and to the professor, that they have a disability. And so what I say to my colleagues is, now that you’ve heard that, I’m guessing you wouldn’t want a student to go through all of that process and jump through all those hoops. And you understand that that’s hurtful and discriminatory itself. Yes, yes, yes. So can we just do away with the bans? And they’re still reluctant, but I managed to convince a few people that at least where we are now it’s impossible to do it fairly.
John: And we should also add that some of the most popular studies that found that result did not fully control for self selection. And when there were controlled experiments, what’s often been found is that it is true that the students who are most likely to choose to use laptops are more likely to be distracted. But that seems to be an issue of the sample selection, rather than the type of modality that they’re using for note taking, and so forth. And in at least some studies, there is no significant difference when the choice of using a laptop or not, is an experimental condition that’s controlled in the experiment. So even that argument breaks down a bit.
KT: Yeah.
John: But the issue about disability is, I think, much more compelling, in any case.
Kat: I’m going to quote you, John. [LAUGHTER]
John: We can include a citation in the show notes too, of at least one or two studies that found that
Rebecca: So, people with disabilities are often subject to comments about how they’re so lucky to have an accessible parking placard so that they can park closer or have extra time on a test. And these comments are often meant to imply that an individual is unfairly getting special treatment. How do you respond? Or how would you coach others to respond to these aggressions?
Kat: It’s hard because it does really hurt. And I’ve gone through different moments of my life where it’s made me cry. I’ve had several people, including one person when I was in a law school parking lot, yell at me about using a disabled parking spot, and I had someone who I thought was a friend, tell me exactly that, that I was lucky. Now that I’m older, I think people are scared enough of me to not say things like that. What I would tell people to say in response, if they are at that place is to ask more questions to say things like, “Oh, really? Why is that? Do you think you need one too? Would you like me to talk to you about why I have one?” But again, it’s difficult, because I don’t think anyone should ever have to explain themselves. So the best answer I’ve ever heard is from a friend of mine named Jesus who drives a Porsche and used a disabled parking placard one six-month period when he was on crutches. People really don’t like to see people with disabilities driving nice cars or really, in general, having nice things. Like the assumption is, we’re supposed to be impoverished and grateful for public transportation, I suppose. But he’s done very well for himself. So one day, he was parked in a disabled spot, and he’s in a Porsche. And before you see him get out, you wouldn’t be able to see his crutches. And so some woman comes up to him and said, “This is a disabled parking spot. How dare you park here? This isn’t for you.” And so then he became very slow and dramatic, and took his crutches from his passenger seat and very slowly and dramatically placed them on the ground. And when he was finally standing upright, he looked at her and said, “Thank you concerned citizen.” [LAUGHTER] and they went on their merry way. He’s a character. And I have some friends with disabilities that when they get stared at, they’ll wave at people, or they’ll get closer to the person staring and say things like, “Oh, do I know you?” [LAUGHTER] …just to kind of like put it on them for being awkward. I also think it’s perfectly okay to get emotionally exhausted by these kinds of statements and to look for spaces, and for a lot of us with disabilities that is online, I have found community on social media that I never even knew existed. I think you should feel absolutely justified in expressing how hurtful those comments are. I think the more important thing in those situations is for allies to immediately speak up, and to call it out… to say, “You only need a disabled parking placard if you are having difficulty with something about getting into the building. Nothing about that is easy, and it’s also none of our business.” So if that can be nipped in the bud by someone else, rather than putting the emotional labor on the person dealing with the reason for the parking placard, that would be ideal. Most people say things to me when I’m on my own. I now am more comfortable standing up for myself. But there’s weird things that happen to you, as a woman with disabilities. There’s some physical safety issues that I have to be concerned with. If I know I’m working late at night, and there aren’t that many other people in the building, I might move my car out of the disabled parking spot into another spot so that people don’t know that the only person in the building is a person with disabilities, which is bad that I have to do that… so I take some extra precautions, I would encourage everyone if they ever feel comfortable getting to the place, to hold their head up high, and to know that their life is too difficult already as a person with disabilities. And if they want to ignore someone, to be my guest, [LAUGHTER] and know that they have the right to do that as well.
Rebecca: I love the emphasis on having allies speak up and speak out. And maybe if you’re an ally, be an ally and have that in your pocket ready to pull out. Practice it.
John: Might this, along with many other reasons, lead people to not take advantage of services designed to accommodate disabilities.
Kat: Yes, so something that I hear from students is, in academic settings, where accommodated students take their tests in a known space. Just to not have to go in that one space, and let everyone know that you are testing with accommodations, students will not ask for accommodations. So the shame and the discrimination that attaches to just getting accommodations is something that stops people who very much need them from asking for them. I’ve had students who are veterans with PTSD and the need for incredibly limited accommodations to just take a break for a moment. Populations like that are afraid of disability… people who went to war are afraid of the stigma of accommodations, so much so that they won’t ask for them. In my own life. I still struggle with it within myself to the point where I make this decision in my head about whether I actually need to park in a disabled spot or not on a daily basis and whether I want to deal with the person that may yell at me. The truth is, I get a form of chemo for my RA, so I can objectively say I get that parking placard. I still don’t use it on days when I think the parking lot is crowded and someone else may need it more than me. I mean, the twisted way it’s affected my own assessment of what I need and what I deserve is really difficult. So I’ve been talking a lot from the perspective of someone with invisible disabilities. Of course, many people don’t have the luxury that I have to kind of decide on and off whether I want to share what I’m going through with respect to disabilities. However, they may still want to have confidentiality that attaches to the nature of their accommodations. For example, to the extent that they need an accommodation that places them closer to an accessible restroom. None of that should be announced to everyone and so fear of those very confidential and personal pieces of information being shared also stops people from asking for accommodations. The student feedback that I get, the reluctance is the stigma from other students and the conversations that the student bodies often have in law school, at least a conversation is, “Oh, whoever’s getting extra time on tests is ruining the curve.” And so people become petrified about being perceived as someone who’s getting an unfair advantage, to the extent they do well.
Rebecca: I hear a lot of conversation about this idea of like not being disabled enough to request accommodations, like you’re talking about, Kat, and I think that’s maybe become even more visible during the pandemic, partly because disability and chronic illness isn’t static, but also there are more folks who are experiencing mental health challenges, and maybe could really benefit from accommodations, but they don’t see themselves or don’t identify as disabled. And it would never occur to them to ask for an accommodation. How do we help these students?
Kat: So I tell my students that the system is not set up to give you too many accommodations, there will be some procedural barrier, or someone that gives you less than what you asked for. So don’t undersell yourself, don’t like negotiate against yourself to begin with, is what I tell my future lawyers. I also tell them that you don’t have to use every accommodation you get. So I think I probably asked for accommodations in law school that made my test-taking situation worse, but I had a certain number of breaks I could take away from the test to stretch and if I didn’t need them, I didn’t need them. And I was always very cautious of like, “Well, am I really taking this to stretch? Or am I taking it because I want to go and like think up this great idea, you know, in the hallway?” But the point being here, if you ask for 30 minutes of extra time, and you only end up needing five minutes or you finished early, that’s a great outcome, right? And if you have them in place, maybe there’s a semester where you don’t need them, maybe there’s a semester that you do need them, but better to have them in place early. I also really work with students, to do this work myself too, right? …to never qualify the word disability and to think in terms of the Americans with Disabilities Act, to talk about all of the heroic activists that fought on behalf of myself and other people with disabilities to make society more accessible and that you’re doing a favor for yourself. But you’re also opening the door and making the process easier and you’re normalizing it for people that come after you. So there’s a lot [LAUGHTER] to put on someone’s shoulders, but I think there’s no way anyone’s ever going to give you more accommodations than you asked for and the process is quite burdensome. So you’re going to lose time and money along the way. But why close yourself out? Why take away the opportunity at equality? You got there, you’re in school, you want to succeed, your here, you got up in the morning, you maybe were flaring, give yourself that extra step of equality that the law says you deserve.
Rebecca: During the Accessing Higher Ground conference this fall, I went to a discussion about an increase of accommodation requests in medical school, and that many of these med students have never needed to ask for accommodations before. And I think that’s something that faculty, staff, students, there’s a great population of individuals who maybe are feeling like they need to ask for accommodations, in part because of their risk, maybe with a pandemic and what have you. What advice do you have for folks who have never navigated this terrain before and now find themselves having to navigate it? It’s really intimidating.
Kat: It absolutely is. And during the first six months of the pandemic, I spent a lot of time… happily, but it was a lot of time… counseling friends from all over the country in different lines of work. And the first barrier was: “I don’t know if I deserve this.” And it absolutely was: :Yes, you do.” So if you can’t get a hold of me… if someone contacts me, I’ll either talk to them myself or find someone that they can get in touch with… but you need to have someone who is familiar with the process talk to you about getting accommodations. This is a very technical piece of advice, but often schools and whether you’re an employee or a student, the documentation form will inform the doctor to send the form directly back to the school. I say, “No, we don’t want anything going directly from my doctor’s office to my school or my employer and there’s nothing in the ADA that requires that kind of like fascist cutting out of the person with the disability.” So I say: “Be active in this process. Call the doctor’s assistant. Speak to the doctor directly. Use plain terms. Think about what you need, put it in your own words.” Again, you’re not doing anything nefarious here. You are the expert, you are the person that understands your body and your needs and your school existence or your working existence. And you try and talk to, especially medical professionals, get them to treat you like a peer and with respect and guide the discussion yourself because once it starts feeling a little bit out of control, and you don’t know what the doctor is written in the form, and a doctor might make a mistake, it’s harder to fix that. So from the outset, what I advise people is, let’s talk about what makes sense for you. Let’s get a hold of the person in the doctor’s office that actually fills out these forms. Are they okay with you being specific about what should go in them? No doctor’s office is like, “Oh, no, we’d like to write this from scratch.” No, [LAUGHTER] they like when you help them. But you need to talk to someone about that. With respect to the pandemic, what’s been really difficult… a lot of things move very quickly, at least, let’s say, in the first six months of the pandemic and then in fall of 2020, when we were all trying to figure out, are we going back in person or not. And schools did a real disservice, I think, to students and faculty and staff alike, by setting up these ad hoc systems that didn’t have any of the confidentiality protections that accommodations typically do. What I tell anyone who needs a COVID related accommodation is to call it a reasonable accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Once you use that phrasing, you’re entitled to quite a few protections that you don’t always get if you just like send back an email form checking, “Oh, I want to work online.” So there have been different ways that schools have tried to not put people into the accommodation trap, because it’s more time intensive, and also it would likely mean that more people get to work or learn online. So to summarize: [LAUGHTER] talk to someone that’s been through it that knows, that can guide you through it, don’t hesitate to recognize that something like asthma is considered a disability because it makes you high risk for COVID. You’re entitled to the ADA protection, and then definitely ask for an ADA-based reasonable accommodation as opposed to any other phrasing that the school comes up with itself. That’s as close to legal advice, I think, as I’ll give.
John: Higher ed institutions have varied quite a bit in terms of addressing those issues. Some are very receptive and have given faculty the freedom to teach the modality that is most appropriate, and others have been much more rigid and have been much more likely to reject all such requests across the board, which has created a lot of challenges for faculty.
Kat: Absolutely.
John: More generally, though, higher ed institutions have, for several years now, been increasing their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, but in those they often leave out issues associated with disability. What are some of the top things that institutions of higher ed can do to be more inclusive for people with disabilities?
Kat: So when we talk about inclusivity, with respect to disability, I would say we’re starting from a different place than some other discussions. And what I mean is, many institutes of higher ed are not legally compliant with the ADA. So the first step, I would say, is an immediate physical audit of all of our physical spaces. There’s an amazing TikToker are called Mya. She’s a student at UMass Amherst, she uses a wheelchair, and she has been going around the entire campus, explaining what buildings she can’t get into, the lack of push buttons, there’ll be an accessible doorway, and then she’ll find herself at the bottom of a flight of stairs. Again, it shouldn’t take someone who uses a wheelchair and enrolls as a student to find those things out. It’s not that expensive to do this kind of physical audit, I think everyone really needs to do it. I work now at Southern which is an HBCU that is progressive in many amazing ways. Before this, I worked at the University of Idaho and found myself with a serious leg break and in a wheelchair for about four months, and discovered, by way of being in a wheelchair, that the building wasn’t accessible. I couldn’t use my office, I couldn’t get into the classrooms. I couldn’t reach the soap in the bathrooms. And that’s, in fact, partially why I became an expert in disability law, I didn’t set out to be it, I had to become that person. I had a couple of friends on the faculty who advocated for me personally, but it was humiliating, and nothing changed, even though I would bring it up every single semester. And they were fairly easy things like get a push button outside of these doors. Part of the reason I left was my fear that a student who used a wheelchair would get there and there’d be no way to make that space accessible to them. So an immediate physical audit. I would also do an immediate review of your institution’s accommodations paperwork. Can you bring it down to fewer pages? Can you cut out the documentation? Is there a way to accept prior documentation and make it straightforward? Some of the things we talked about… putting certain accommodations in place at the moment they’re asked for rather than when the full accommodations are approved. An example is something like note takers. When a student asks for note takers, very rarely is that request denied. So why not just from the first date always have a note taker in a class? Fine. if the accommodation actually gets rejected? Oh no, we’ve given the student notes for four weeks, what will we ever do? Our entire institution now is lacking in integrity. No, we’re fine, right? [LAUGHTER] It just doesn’t matter that much. And then, as I mentioned before, we need to have these conversations assuming people with disabilities are in the room. They have to be less patronizing, right? There’s a lot of like condescension involved in talking about people with disabilities. I think after all of that is done, then we can kind of talk about beyond legal compliance. What does it mean to be welcoming and inclusive? As a person with disabilities who in academic spaces still struggles to like, move, I’m not yet ready to talk about being welcomed. In fact, what I say to people is like, you can be mean to me, as long as I can reach the soap in the bathroom, I’m at peace with that. [LAUGHTER] So we need to have those conversations first, then you can throw me a pizza party.
Rebecca: I think also, in addition to probably those physical spaces, we should be doing some virtual audits as well. And making sure those spaces are accessible for a wide range of other disabilities who would benefit from making sure those materials are also reachable.
Kat: And anytime you can put the onus on someone who isn’t a person with disabilities to double check that things are working, that’s such a relief. And so sometimes that means double checking, if you have note takers, did the notes look good? Are they a mess? When I was a student, I received notes. I asked that my note taker have the same GPA range as me? [LAUGHTER] Yeah, no, I did say, “You know, there’s some stuff that’s missing. Is anyone reviewing them?” “Oh, no, we don’t have time for that.” Okay, so are we going through the motions or are we doing something that’s meaningful? A lot about that was getting feedback from students. I have seen student activism at law schools. When student groups for people with disabilities and allies are formed, they can do so much more than I can do as a faculty member. So to the extent you don’t have a disabled students group on campus, and you want to be an ally, I would think about how to get one started, because just the presence of that group is so meaningful. And in my days of activism, at least when I was like marching in the streets, are long gone. But when I meet these young people, ah, they’re so exciting. And they think of things that I won’t think of because I haven’t been in school for a while. Now. I’m on the other side. So I find listening to student activists very helpful and eye opening.
John: Do you have any other advice that you’d like to pass on to our listeners?
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Kat: I would say anyone that goes into a position of leadership should be educated, or at least know who to turn to with respect to disability access, and disability inclusion. And so that can mean high level things like making sure that you hire someone with disabilities, they are given all the tools to succeed. It can also mean okay, you’re someone, maybe a student, who plans a conference. Is the conference accessible? Do we have a checklist that makes it easy for people who maybe might need an ASL interpreter, for example? Is all of that there and available? Are we treating disability awareness as a key part of the skill set that you need to be a leader?
Rebecca: I love that advice and something that’s definitely not typical as part of training or just general awareness that we share within our community in higher education. So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?
Kat: I’ll tell you about my scholarship and then I’ll tell you what I’m thinking about with respect to my disabled community in general. So my next piece within the disability law sphere is looking to the way we force medical encounters on people with disabilities just to get access to benefits, for example, or to get access to accommodations in the workplace. And to the extent that we are a society that believes in medical choice, or we pretend to, or we have respect for bodily integrity, why does that change? Why are we so willing to force medical encounters and sometimes really intrusive medical examinations on people with disabilities? Aside from that, I, as a high-risk person, every day, I am still fighting for my life. I take three immunosuppressants, like a lot of people with autoimmune disease. And so I am tired [LAUGHTER] of asking people to pull their mask above their nose. This happens, for example, in the waiting room of the chemo infusion center. So, there are people sitting amongst cancer patients who have their masks not above their faces. So I think for people with disabilities, the pandemic has been petrifying. And occasionally we feel… occasionally… quite often… we feel abandoned. And when it comes to discussions in higher ed about, “Well, should people be back in person?” …and as soon as the conversation turns to “Well, I just prefer to be in person.” That’s great, but don’t forget our humanity. And again, don’t forget who else is in the room and part of that discussion. And earn a minimum, we should be trying to keep people alive. And then second, we can talk about whether you feel more comfortable delivering your contracts lecture [LAUGHTER] 10 feet away from someone or over Zoom. As I say that very critical statement, I work for a… we call our Deans Chancellors down here… and he starts every meeting with a reminder that our safety is his highest concern. And even though there’s no indoor mask mandate in Louisiana, we have a mandate at my law school. I work in an HBCU, and the African-American community has been hit disproportionately by COVID, and the recognition of what it takes to keep everyone safe is very much on my boss’s mind in a way that I truly appreciate. So it’s not an announced concern for people with disabilities, but it’s sort of like a universal design, right? …safety for all, that has tremendous implications for high-risk people like myself.
Rebecca: What a great perspective to be having when you’re in a leadership role.
Kat: Yeah, absolutely.
John: It’d be nice if that were more widely shared across all institutions.
Rebecca: Thank you so much for the wide variety of information that you’ve shared with us today and advice and some ideas about ways to continue to support our community.
John: Thank you.
Kat: Thank you.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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