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Thursday, September 26, 2024

A Nice Bit of Law and Political Economy-Oriented Reporting on Disability Accommodations

The Chronicle of Higher Education is at its best when it offers the occasional bit of long-form journalism, filling the gap left wide open by the long-dead, long-mourned magazine Lingua Franca. Here's an interesting piece (paywalled, alas) in that vein. It's written by a professor but clearly must be taken to be a piece of journalism rather than expert commentary--which is good, because I'm not an expert reader on the subject, but it does a good job of interviewing a variety of individuals and discussing recent studies. The headline asks, "Do Colleges Provide Too Many Disability Accommodations?" The answer is, "Most likely, yes."

My sense is that, if one takes the definitions that seem increasingly to prevail in the mine run of legal academic literature, the article, and the issue it discusses, can be thought of as a law and political economy story. (Admittedly, some scholars use more specific definitions of the term; others use definitions derived from the 200 years of law and political economy scholarship that preceded the present, somewhat amnesiac version; and still others have retooled their articles for the submission game by adding "law and political economy" to what are apparently already-existing articles, while using a highly protean definition of the term.) At its broadest level, the article can be understood as arguing that the force behind universities granting an excessive number and degree of disability accommodations is neoliberalism. (For a definition of that term, see my prior parenthetical note.) More specifically, it can be taken to argue that the reason for the phenomenon is a combination of institutional factors: 1) laziness, greed, budget cuts, fear of litigation and/or increased insurance premiums, indifference to professors' views and role in governance, and a capitalist imperative to enroll more students and adopt a more consumer-oriented attitude on the part of universities; 2) greed and market imperatives among disability testing services; 3) careerist cowardice among disability scholars; and other forces. The result, the author argues, is an exacerbation of existing inequality:

The equity problem should be clear: If accommodations help everyone, and we relax the diagnostic criteria necessary for securing them, wealthier students will experience even more of an advantage, which is precisely what we are seeing. Accommodations are disproportionately secured by the highest performing students, further increasing the achievement gap. In one study of students receiving accommodations at a selective private college, most “showed above-average cognitive abilities, average academic skills, and no evidence of impairment.” Limited resources should be going to the students who need them most, not the students who are most skilled at securing them. A more restrictive approach to diagnosing disability and granting accommodations would allow for increased focus on lower-socioeconomic status students who are dramatically underperforming compared to their peers but do not have a diagnosis (or a disability). It would also lower the disability-provider-to-student ratio, facilitating better care for students with more serious disabilities.

Given the forces the author discusses, and universities' own place in the ecosystem of late capitalism, I am dubious of the author's closing suggestion that "higher education is ideally positioned to take the lead" on addressing these issues. This seems like the kind of BS we usually see at the end of a perfectly interesting descriptive and analytical article because of individual academic market actors' inability to resist the pressure to include a set of recommendations for reform. Nevertheless, and without endorsing all its analysis, I found the article interesting, and no doubt most teachers will. Read the whole thing, if you have the economic power to do so. 

 

Posted by Paul Horwitz on September 26, 2024 at 08:53 AM in Paul Horwitz | Permalink

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