Student Accommodations in Higher Education: Faculty Resistance and Workload

This is a companion piece to my morning reflection on teaching with chronic illness. And this post–which has nothing to do with Women Writing Crime Fiction (sorry, readers!) is more likely to be of interest to folks who teach in higher ed and who, like me, are growing increasingly concerned about the discourse around student accommodations, faculty obligations, and faculty resistance.

To be clear: faculty members are not providing accommodations to students because we’re nice people (although most of us are); we’re doing it because it’s the law, and it’s our job. So when faculty members muse out loud about not meeting student needs as outlined on individual accommodation plans–well, that’s just not okay. I understand that accommodations are a workload issue and some can be onerous (many are not, requiring minute adjustments to my teaching and an email or two to execute).

Let me tell you a story: years ago, in a first-year writing class, a student struggled into class with a cast from ankle to thigh on one leg and a single crutch for support. She explained to me that she was trying to manage with just the one because her science lab instructor had prohibited the use of crutches in the lab, as a safety issue. And then told her that she would fail the lab component of the course if she missed labs. No other options. So now she was trying to train herself to walk with a broken leg and no crutches. I had an interesting conversation with the science lab in question, then with the university’s office for accessibility–which wouldn’t enable an accommodation for a temporary injury, back in those days (and I do hope that’s changed), and finally with the human rights office, which was terrific. The student passed the course and I filed this away as an individual example of intransigence.

But I’m worried that individual examples of resistance to necessary accommodation are multiplying and that the language we’re using about student accommodations is increasingly anti-student (not in my own institutional context, to be clear: we have a terrific Centre for Accessible Learning and high faculty buy-in, from what I’ve seen, because at a college with an accessibility mandate, and given our small classes, accommodations are a must. I loved working at CAL several years ago and had amazing colleagues).

Some of my colleagues in English studies and writing, though, are teaching in lecture halls filled with hundreds of students, and if, say 5-10% of students (and the proportion has been growing–by some estimates, quite sharply post-COVID) require formal accommodations, you could be looking at several dozen student with distinctive needs for access to course materials, tutorial participation, class attendance, need for lecture notes from classmates, and test/exam accommodations that require potentially writing many versions of each assessment, to be delivered on different dates.

And this is a lot of work: let’s be clear. A piece like this one by Simon Lewsen outlines those challenges in detail, and it’s a convincing case. It’s a weakness, though, that the author collapses the distinction between formal accommodations and informal student requests: we have to give a student 1.5 time for an exam if that’s the accommodation plan, which has been formulated based on documentation of that individual student’s need; we don’t have to excuse a class member for soccer practice every other class. (Although the pressure from varsity coaches lobbying for student athletes to miss weeks of classes without consequences can be intense–and it’s interesting that we don’t discuss this as accommodations.) I also wish the author didn’t refer to student accessibility services as the “university bureaucracy”, which is misleading. This is an important and legally mandated service.

But Lewsen makes lots of good points here about faculty workload creep and the challenges of contingent (sessional/term/adjunct) faculty members. I’ve had colleagues–from all academic ranks–tell me that they’re not “paid enough” to deal appropriately with everything that’s thrown at us in teaching these days. But we can’t sacrifice the legally-mandated human rights piece of providing student accommodations just because we’re exhausted.

This very recent piece in the Globe follows similar lines. The number here startled me, but it’s in line with my experience at a college (although not at B.C. universities): “More than 6,000 of the roughly 28,000 students at Queen’s last year (22 per cent) were approved for such accommodations by the disabilities office. Five years ago, it was about 2,250 students (9 per cent).”

Okay, that’s a huge jump in five years, so what happened here? What is the impact of COVID, and a cohort of students who completed high school online? What percentage of these students are international students? (Because in my experience, international students have lower rates–in part because they’re often from countries where there’s a different societal attitude to testing for learning disabilities and other additional learning needs.) And, most crucially, what is Queen’s doing to keep up with this much higher level of need for accommodations: have they increased budgets for TAs, smaller classes, invigilation, and note-taking services? Or is everything being dumped on instructors?

Also, in a way, this is really good news, because, as the Globe article points out, it suggests increasing access to higher ed–including elite higher ed–for young people with disabilities, including earlier identification/accommodation in school and diminished stigma. These are excellent developments in higher ed, as Jay Dolmage identifies here.

We need some big shifts (ideally increases, but I’m a realist, at least today) in resources to offer more support for students with accommodations and the people who teach them.

And I’m not persuaded that the top priority is more admin roles, such as the “hiring of a senior academic leader responsible for accommodation and a committee of staff, faculty and students to advise that person, half of whom should be disabled.”

Although I’d love the job, Queen’s, if you decide to go looking and the bigger names in the field aren’t available. I can’t think of a better dream job than helping universities become more accessible while supporting faculty and staff in managing student needs and expectations related to accommodation with kindness, care, and empathy.