Disabled students are badly served by furore over ‘unfair’ accommodations

The idea that “accommodations have gone wild” – with too many disabled students receiving too many disability accommodations – is a critique that some are keen to make, with such claims usually accompanied by accusations of wokeness overpowering academic integrity.

As someone who has been a student with a disability at the University of Sydney, then a faculty disability liaison officer there, and is today associate dean of student affairs, overseeing 17,000 students in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, I can state categorically that this idea is much closer to a moral panic narrative than reality. In fact, there is compelling evidence to suggest disabled students remain significantly disadvantaged by university systems and structures that impose administrative burdens and literal obstacles in their way, making the full university experience inaccessible for these students.

This type of misunderstanding arose recently in a Times Higher Education piece by Justin Noia, from Providence College in Rhode Island, which suggested that disability accommodations imperilled assessment and credentials that follow presented a deceptive sense of an individual’s ability.

He would seem to have students like me in mind. My disability includes being neurodivergent, which is described by Griffith University psychologist Chris Edwards as “brain functioning that is different from the majority and encompasses conditions such as autism, ADHD, and dyslexia”. Part of the moral panic described by Dr Noia attempts to essentialise and isolate cognitive or potentially invisible disabilities from more visible disabilities. The idea seems to be that an explosion of both less serious, potentially fraudulent, and simultaneously disqualifying intellectual conditions are undermining exam-taking by requiring accommodations such as more time.

This is problematic for many reasons. In 2019, I helped lead a survey of arts students at the University of Sydney with disabilities. Of the 28 per cent of arts students in the survey that identified that they had a disability, 79 per cent of those lived with an additional disability. Therefore, the type or conditions of a disability cannot be conveniently separated from the person with the disability, the array of obstacles introduced to tax their lived experience, or how they move through the world. 

In 2022, I conducted an additional smaller survey (n=156) of those in my school who were living with a disability, of whom 75 per cent were students and 25 per cent were staff. Of these respondents, 13 per cent stated that they were living with a disability. Those in academia know this is an undercount. I asked if the students with a disability had accessed any available university resources. Of these, 8 per cent had accessed assistive technologies, and 10 per cent had accessed a Disability Support Fund.

But the highest response rate at 32 per cent was, “I have not accessed these resources.” The panic in higher education should be focused not on the few students with a disability who access supportive accommodations to get through their studies but on the many who do not. If universities abandon their duty of care and decide that disabled students deserve less than the nothing that they usually receive, we have all lost our way. 

A final question in my survey asked students with a disability to what extent they felt supported by the school. While it was important that about 60 per cent felt supported or better, 17 per cent chose “neither supported nor unsupported”. It is common knowledge that some professors do not record their lectures, and others put their lecture slides up after the lecture has occurred, which can mean that students who need visual assistance struggle, and this is all under the hope that the classroom in which the course is being held is not an old academic building without a (functioning) elevator or ramps.

It is here that I reach agreement with Dr Noia on the central point that “giving some students more help than others undermines” the credentials that universities provide. He’s right; however, I would argue that credentialling is, in fact, endangered by the existing unfairness faced by students with disabilities. Universities need to centre students with disabilities in our communities and educational environments as well as ensure equity in resource allocations and course tasks. My belief is that students with disabilities are wonderful and that they often teach us much more than we ever teach them.

However, my chief opposition to Dr Noia’s proposition extends to both equity and academic integrity.

A central flaw in the argument of opposing these student accommodations is not just that they would take specific accommodations away, which would inevitably take certain students away. It is, in fact, an overarching concession that lecturers and professors cannot determine if a student with a disability is qualified to pass or fail their course. If the argument is that disability accommodations are yet another element of the woke agenda and that this wave of wokeness has overpowered academics to such an extent that we cannot be trusted to exercise discretion in the classroom, in marking, in designing assessments (and in reaching accommodations for dozens of students on dozens of different issues each semester), then the accommodations are not the problem, we are.

It is worth mentioning specifically that there are lots of accommodations for different types of students in academia, and when used appropriately I am in total support. In 2018, Gomez, Bradley, and Conway studied elite student athletes and noted, “Over one-third of universities are able to offer access to academic courses via reduced academic requirements.” Again, accommodations are not the problem, highlighting the accommodations that students with disabilities receive apart from all others places a marginalised group further on the margins.

Finally, the argument that academics know what the “real world” is like, better than those living with a disability, who face the job market every day, does not pass the pub test. People with disabilities are equipped to bring their authentic selves to their jobs, and their studies.

My hope is that this important conversation stirs university action to redouble accommodations, to help more students with disabilities and ensure equal opportunity. There is nothing more deceptive in the pursuit of knowledge than the idea that it only fits one type of person.

I have a colleague with a disability who always says: “Replace your sympathy with opportunity.” In short, I have faith in all my students and my colleagues, chairs and departments to deliver their courses and degrees with integrity. Universities must do more to address the way they disadvantage students with a disability. Accommodations is a good place to start but more is needed.

Chris Pepin-Neff is senior lecturer in public policy and associate dean at the University of Sydney.