6 Promises vs. Practices
“If you want your institution to be great, if you want your institution to live up to “we’re inclusive, we’re accessible” and all this stuff, you have to put in the work too. Because just saying it doesn’t make the difference” – AK (Student). Our findings indicate that there is a conflict between institutional promises of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) and student experiences of relevant practices or lack thereof. In interviews, students described a disconnect between what their higher education institutions advertise as commitments to academic belonging “for all” versus their experiences of academic access.
“I’ll say just a small group of people, they’re dealing with the well-being of the whole of the university, and their workloads are just piling up and piling up” – YZ (Student)
In particular, there is a gap between institutions’ obligations on paper and what student accessibility services and course instructors can deliver in practice. Student interviewees told us that accessibility offices seem to be overstretched and under-resourcedStudent accessibility offices may not provide the full extent of accommodations and supports that students are entitled to because they may not be equipped to deal with a high volume of student applications with limited funding and supports at their disposal (Dolmage, 2017).
“…the international student whose first language isn’t in English, who requires Kurzweil to read, but doesn’t have an official diagnosis… They don’t have disability rights to fall back on.” – Fady Shanouda (Faculty) Students described a disconnect between accommodations provided on paper (e.g., their accommodation letters) and their actual needs. For example, one student shared with us that despite having an approved accommodation for online instruction, their instructor was not equipped to deliver their course content virtually. While this student had been provided an accommodation (e.g., a virtual link to class), they did not experience meaningful access (e.g., could not see the board, could not participate in the discussion, etc.).
In interviews, access leaders repeatedly stressed a discrepancy between what the institution validates as disability and functional limitations on the one hand, and the lived experiences of disability and disabled students’ expertise on their access needs on the other. Academic accommodations are individual, rights-based, demand-based, case-by-case interventions to the systemic violence of ableism impacting disabled students. As such, academic accommodations processes are typically structured to fulfill legal obligations to accommodate students with disabilities with rights and medically documented functional limitations. Interviewees repeatedly made clear that these processes often exclude undocumented students and students with precarious immigration status who are denied legal recourse.
“Using only the medical model provides a very narrow understanding of the human experience…That narrow definition [of disability] is helpful to define who they help and why. But then, when we’re talking about radical access, those things [definitions] are very limiting, because there’s only certain people with access to those definitions.” – ND (Student)
Overall, there is a gap between students with access needs and those who can access academic accommodations. Academic accommodation processes are more accessible to more privileged students, to the exclusion of multiply marginalized and underrepresented students (Gorman, 2013; Dhanota, 2023). Racialized students who are deterred by medical racism, and poor and low-income students who cannot afford the fees for medical documentation may not be able to successfully apply for academic accommodations (Dhanota, 2023; Waterfield & Whelan, 2017). The impact is that many multiply marginalized students with access needs are not able to access academic accommodations.