15 Systemic problems need systemic responses
“I am not trying to discount the amount of emotional labor that goes into some of this work…but I want to make sure a lot of the attention goes to actually changing the system… I don’t want too much time talking of how hard it is to be Black and how hard it is to fight for Black rights…if I tell you how hard it is to be Black in the system, you might be like, ‘That’s really profound,’ you might cry some tears, but the system ain’t change.” – Hodari Reuben Clarke (Student)
Students, faculty, and access professionals call for systemic responses and proactive, upstream approaches to academic access. Academic accommodations do not address the root causes of the lack of access in higher education, i.e., racism, ableism, sanism, and other interlocking systems of oppression that inform the design of inaccessible classrooms, course delivery, and learning environments. Instead, academic accommodations address the symptoms of systemic oppression in higher education.
“I want to put it in the water. And by that, I mean, we need to rethink the way we want to educate. And we need to think about education as a form of care.” – Hodari Reuben Clarke (Student)In particular, student access leaders call for upstream approaches so that students are not left struggling merely to stay afloat downstream. We need to put access “in the water”. This means making it the collective responsibility of the academic community, rather than leaving it as the individual responsibility of students, select faculty who make it their responsibility, and student accessibility services offices.
Systemic and upstream approaches to access shift the responsibility of access from an individual/isolated struggle to the institution and academic community as a whole. Access must be a campus-wide commitment and practice, requiring a concerted effort from all stakeholders in the university community. Ramping up institutional capacity for access in the areas of teaching, technology, and the built environment can increase access capacity campus-wide.