The Americans with Disabilities Act is flawed, as any legislation of its scope will necessarily be, and you can find examples of those flaws if you look around a bit.
hard to really neatly sort out What It Means but there's definitely a lot of What It Means about how the nyc subway is the most egregious widespread ada violation i've ever come across, like the wealthiest city in america, a permablue city in a permablue state doesn't value the ada enough to make it apply to the most critical peace of public infrastructure in the city
Sitting right now on an MTA subway train I’d say they believe keeping the system just moving enough at all is the priority as it is squarely in the physical danger zone for all riders, and extra especially plagued recently by aggressive, transmissive, and trending-to-violence unhoused people. Every day for the last week a child under 10 has walked through my car (and I use 3 different lines) selling candy, alone. You should see the tacky puddles of ?? in the floor under my feet.
All to say, concern over NYC’s dire infrastructure of America’s largest urban rail ridership and the safety— ok gotta stop a man is screaming curses right now behind me.
Okay last stop for me.
Anyway, permablue??? That stuff is for political society mind games. The concept doesn’t have much bearing on the millions of people with their feet on the ground and sticking to the subway car floors.
People with disabilities are people, all the people in New York City are people, to pick the single worst example of access, safety, and reliability, that’s low hanging fruit that’s already in the grass and rotting.
And one last thing, since I’ve been in New York City the last few weeks I have also noticed they’re now making public announcements on every train I‘ve ridden specifying which stations have elevators that are ahead of us and which don’t, letting passengers know that if they need the elevator to exit at a prior or subsequent station, then take a city bus back to their chosen destination.
These announcements are recent, so they are making— by the standard of the MTA— a very reasonable effort. It is the mountainously mind-boggling truth of the deteriorating subway system that characterizes simply these announcements alone as a welcome reasonable effort.
BTW all New York City MTA buses are equipped as per ADA guidelines. And they really work well. So there’s that.
As with most trends these days, I think it comes down to social media and its incentives. Material stuff is not cool or sexy, doesn't inflame culture war, and won't get you likes and followers on social media. Vibes-based stuff gets you all of that and more.
Material drift: I eventually tuned out all ADA/"disability"-inflected stuff, because it was just so much Thoughts And Prayers at best, or thinly-veiled Harrison Bergeson apologia at worst. What finally garnered some actual sympathy and understanding from me was a materialist argument advanced by infamous far-left radical Steve Sailer, describing the "curb-cut effect"...that is, that many accommodations like ramps, sidewalk grading, grab bars, etc. are useful and appreciated *even by the abled*. Ramps are great when pushing a stroller or hand truck, just like for wheelchairs! It's nice having an extra surface to balance personal belongings on while on the can! Elevators are way safer than escalators and stairs! So even from a narrow self-interest angle, all morals and "rights" aside, it's worth advancing these types of physical accommodations on the margin rather than cede all infrastructure to relentless cost-cutting optimization. It's shameful that I didn't get this lesson from actual progressives, who profess to care the most about the disabled...too busy rewriting the latest edition of Approved Language To Use When Referring To People Experiencing Disability. Which is important because the words we use manifest the change we want, or...something something stigma reduction, I guess?
I appreciate the truth of the "curb-cut effect" — and have felt that appreciation increase since becoming the steward of a tiny human whom I move about in a stroller — but I have seen this concept getting abused in higher ed, where one often hears employees of the teaching and learning centers or the disability resource centers (many of whom have either never taught actual students in an actual classroom themselves, or, if they have, it was third-graders, or fifteen years ago as a TA a couple of times) state as an article of faith that if instructors just *design in the accommodations* all students will benefit (cue discussion of the utility of curb-cuts by non-disabled people — *everything* is like a curb-cut!).
Early in my teaching career, I bought this, or tried to, and I watched the norm in my departments shift toward doing this based on some combination of uncritical acceptance and fear of being painted as unconcerned with equity, access, and student wellbeing. Providing PowerPoint slides for the lecture to students before the class was probably the most common accommodation I saw back then, and in the spirit of "universal design," instructors were encouraged to provide slides in advance for *everyone*, not just the students with that accommodation, and there was a lot of chirpy "It helps everybody!" discourse flying around — Consider students who miss class due to illness! Or want to focus on what you're saying while you lecture instead of writing down the content of the slides! It helps students with different learning styles! It wasn't until everyone had been doing this for literal years that a few brave souls started revisiting outmoded ideas like, "Taking good notes while listening to someone talk is a professional skill that students can become better at in college if they practice," and, "The work of distilling the main ideas of a lecture into notes — of deciding what to write down and what to leave out — requires you to recapitulate the material in your own words, which is how you actually learn," and, "Maybe the reason students are all so depressed and lonely and anxious and sucking at academics is that they don't come to class anymore, and maybe that's got something to do with the fact that we've made it possible to access all the content without showing up!"
Which is to say, there were tradeoffs to universalizing this accommodation, but it would have been heretical to express that because the universal design dogma was so entrenched, and the curb-cut effect was a big part of the justification.
I could go on and on... there are so many examples of disability center staff justifying some extremely burdensome accommodation or encouraging faculty to "just" give it to everyone with the rationale that it's just like a curb cut — not because it is, but because their worldview depends in part on the curb-cut effect being universal. If it's not, their job isn't "promoting access and inclusion." These people are typically overworked and underpaid, and it's much easier to put up with that if you believe you're doing the lord's work. If you're just protecting the university from ADA lawsuits (which, to be clear, is the actual job), why bother?
For sure, any model can produce perverse results if taken out of distribution or pushed to extremes. I actually hadn't realized the printed PP slides thing was considered an "accommodation" - no one framed it that way to us students at the time, that was just How Things Arbitrarily Were sometimes (not every class would do it), and mostly led to a ton of wasted paper because people suck at PowerPoint.
Keep trying to add a more substantial response but I feel like I'm just reiterating Classic Freddie. The situation in academia is unfortunate these days; I feel sorry for the young people paying more for a worse education than I got, one that doesn't challenge them with the same kind of stakes. Like, yeah, it sucked to eventually drop out of college like a failure, but it was also a huge wake-up call to turn my life and self-assumptions around. Feels like so many people just sort of...academically malinger these days, subsisting on well-intentioned accommodations and stigma-reducing sympathy, only to eventually graduate with a mediocre degree that didn't prepare them for either the modern workplace or life more generally. (And Freddie would explain that's cause we value relative ability much more than absolute ability...)
Oh yeah, I'm not saying *you're wrong*, I'm just saying even this smart and useful idea (whose originator probably wouldn't have depicted it as anywhere near so broadly relevant!) is getting stretched and warped to serve other purposes by the particular disability ecosystem that we're currently living with in higher ed.
And I'm totally not surprised that the PowerPoint slides thing wasn't perceived as an accommodation by students. All those accommodation letters we get are private (and don't even tell us what disability we're accommodating, so I have no idea how the prevalence of various diagnoses has changed over time — just the prevalence of specific accommodations), so faculty have every incentive not to acknowledge that accommodations are even being granted, or to refer to what they are, and the voices calling for universalizing those accommodations are doing so in fora from which students are totally excluded — faculty meetings, departmental faculty email lists, workshops and trainings put on by the teaching center and disability services staff, presentations at faculty retreats, etc. There are these totally student-free channels where faculty explicitly and implicitly negotiate norms around what we do and do not do for students, and the norms can be somewhat coercive, especially for pre-tenure faculty, both because you're seen as not supporting what is in students' best interest if you don't go in on a practice that has been dubbed "inclusive", and because the students develop expectations based on what happens in the bulk of their classes. If you deviate from a norm that students like, you hear about it.
Adjuncts are in many cases in a much more difficult position, because they're still subject to student complaints if they deviate from the norms, but unless they've been teaching in the department for a long time and the department is super-proactive about including them, they have no idea what the norms are — they aren't in those fora where they get developed. And most of the students don't even know what an adjunct is.
That honestly sounds pretty wild? And also familiar, from other activist scenes where people purport to speak for [marginalized/patronized-to group] but don't necessarily actually consult with said group. Does anyone ever just...you know...ask the students what they do or don't need, and change practices accordingly? (I can already guess the rejoinder: no, you can't do that publically, else people might reveal that they're disabled/would like an accommodation, and that might cause *stigma*...) Like from a 90s environmentalist background, if I'd known back then that this is why I get all these useless PowerPoint printouts, I'd have been happy to privately inform teachers that they don't need to do that for me. Save a tree and all that. And maybe if a critical mass of like-minded did the same, that'd have shifted the norm, and people wouldn't assume that's the default behaviour going forward. Sad!
Appreciate the inside-baseball scoop, by the way. It's always fascinating to hear the nuts and bolts of jobs on the other side of the metaphorical counter.
Oh God, I never printed out the slides! I just shared them in digital format! I suspect one reason the practice of sharing them in advance has blown up since I was in college is that it's cheap to do it now. Man, I can imagine getting a stern talking to from the department manager if I wasted toner like that (everyone gets a unique copier code so they know who to come after for that sort of thing).
Students with accommodations are supposed to meet with faculty one-on-one on the first day of class to sort out which accommodations are actually needed in the class, and in every class I have 1-2 students who stay after on the first day because they want to go over their accommodations with me. I end up having to email the rest to try to get them to have the conversation, maybe 50% respond. Super stressful! And a lot of times they do end up saying, "Oh, I don't really need that accommodation."
Taking the temperature of a whole class is harder. I think I get a lot more information than a lot of faculty, both because students tend to find me approachable (I'm a small woman who smiles a lot and is willing to be goofy in class), and because I incorporate a lot of feedback mechanisms into my classes (everything from anonymous surveys to extra credit test questions to "raise your hand if you want to..." quick surveys). But you can't ask about every practice (there are too many!), and most of the time the number of students who like that you do X is equal to the number who don't like that you do it (per the anonymous surveys). When faculty discuss these things, we're all speaking from our own idiosyncratic mix of what we've heard students say, studies we've read, what we were told at some inclusive teaching workshop last month (or in 2003), and our personal beliefs about what the kids now days do and don't find helpful. So it's not so much a lack of interest in consulting with them as it is a practically difficult matter of figuring out the preferences of a heterogenous group of people in a reliable way. (Also: Research shows that students aren't necessarily great at assessing their own learning in real time, so even though we tend to equate "what they like" with "what helps them learn," those aren't necessarily the same.)
But, that's coming from a broke-ass public teaching university, where declines in retention (and by extension enrollment, and by extension tuition) could actually kill a department. People who teach at schools like that care A LOT more about students' opinions than people who teach at R1s.
Also, "academically malinger" is such a good term for it. I am totally with you in feeling sad for these kids going into debt for a crappy education, and I was always trying to remind my colleagues that "they're going into debt!" is a reason *to* hold them to standards, not a reason to just pass them through. The debt is just one more reason that the degree needs to have actually taught them something — otherwise, the money and the struggle to repay it doesn't actually get them much of anything. Put it like that and nobody will disagree with you, but when you're actually in the faculty meeting trying to point out that a lot of what is being proposed in the name of "accommodation" or relieving students' financial or emotional burdens will just make it easier for them to graduate without learning anything, you often sound (and feel) like a complete ogre.
“People in the disability rights world advocate for the “social model of disability,” which holds that a disabled person is not lacking in any capability, but rather that the human-built world was not made to accommodate that person; the problem isn’t the runner in the race but the designer of the course. ”
As many others did, I grew up in a time where the disabled were regularly mocked by children and adults alike, and I can’t imagine how hurtful and dispiriting that would be. But (and there always a but) the idea there’s some plane of reality where everything is peachy for everyone is just absurd. And while the activist’s heart might be in the right place, in the real world people will look at this tortured argument and say, “that is just crazy” and comfortably dismiss the rest. It actively works against the cause of disabled rights to espouse it.
To me this is a part of what I would observe as a larger rejection of the concept of 'normal' or at least a great queasiness about identifying or defending anything as normal, since there is an inherent exclusionary element to it. Obviously what is and isn't normal has been used as a cudgel in ways that a liberal person ought to reject as wrong and incompatible with the larger liberal project. However at a certain point that person also has to develop a theory of the world, and to understand why some things work and some things don't. That means drawing some lines, of which some things will end up on the wrong side.
The social model stuff leads to confusing language games. They'll say that disability is entirely social and then when people raise the obvious objection that many disabilities have intrinsic downsides they'll turn around and say "Um, actually, we make a distinction between disability and impairment. The intrinsically bad stuff is the impairment."
If only people would just say "Disability involves intrinsic downsides and downsides that emerge from a lack of social accommodation , so we should do what we can do minimise both" instead of redefining words and introducing complex jargon.
I remember when I was looking at what the social model of disability was about, and when I saw the distinction made between "impairment" and "disability", I thought, "Good grief, they're just using 'impairment' to describe what everyone else calls a 'disability', and then redefining 'disability'!" 🤦♂️ I wouldn't call the "social model of disability" a model at all. It's just an obscurantist word game.
I've been teaching design and disability for the last dozen years and am the parent of a teenager with Down syndrome. Much has changed in the small world of online rhetoric and in elite university practice in that time, as you've documented. In the last couple of years, I'm finding students CAN see how improbable the ballooning ADHD numbers are, CAN recognize the social media distortions of self-dx, etc. They're caught in it. But they do see something's off, and most of them crave good hard conversations about how to make sense. My main conclusion is this: when we jump from tangible reasonable accommodations to the vague and immaterial need to get "beyond" access, focus on stigma, medicalize ordinary human variation, it's partly a signal that schools and cultural institutions have abandoned any sustained attention to the question of suffering. Is suffering a given, non-optional part of life? Or is it a glitch in the body-as-machine? How do we distinguish our ordinary suffering from the unacceptable, and what do families and cultures and states do about it? Philosophical and ancient wisdom traditions are ready with insight, but schools don't teach these domains. So we stretch the logic of accommodations far beyond what it can hold. We speak in the thinnest therapeutic language for all our troubles. We resign ourselves to the ever-receding goalposts that hold something like "belonging," because we can't imagine shoring up forms of life outside the machines-and-markets shape of the modern world.
I'm glad you cited the test accommodation issue in higher ed. These accommodation forms roll in at the beginning of every semester and are just accepted now as a fact of life. I have known many students that genuinely needed them (veterans with TBIs, student with serious ADHD that causes them obvious life management issues). But the overall game is given away when a bunch of students only use them when they don't get the grade they wanted on the first exam, or seem upset when you assign take-home projects rather than timed exams. High school parents in competitive districts learned a long time ago that test accommodations are a thing to seek to give their children a leg up in the ridiculous competition for top 20 university admissions.
K-12 and special education mandates are another area with serious issues around disability issues. I don't envy any parent that has to fight the system to get what they think they need for the student, but a whole culture has arisen around special ed that isn't serving anyone well. Savvy parents with money or that are being supported by special ed "advocates" quickly learn what they can demand and will try to get things that their children don't even need. One example are full-time para-educators following individual students around all day and maybe spending 10% of their time actually supporting that child. Out-of-district placements are also through the roof and cost districts millions to send kids to private schools that continually increase their tuition because they know the districts are legally mandated to pay (or risk losing lawsuits which districts are loathe to pursue). Wealthy parents come in armed with lawyers to get the public to pay for the particular school they want, or for a tutor offering a very specific kind of tutoring that may or may not be appropriate. Parents without money, recent immigrants, or others that can't work the system end up not getting what their kids need because the district is overwhelmed with requests and end up wary of anything as their budgets are blown up by out of district costs. The whole system needs major reform, likely requiring public special ed schools to keep school systems from being bankrupted.
I have no idea how to solve for the general problem of "this rule put in place to help people X is now being exploited by people of means to gain advantage over each other." By definition they have means and know how to exploit the system and hire people to fight you in all the relevant arenas.
Also Freddie's talk of moving a wheelchair around Boston reminds me of similar things in that city and Boston is probably above average. Just as a test, roll a simple thing like an IV stand around a "walkable" city the next time you're in one. You aren't allowed to hop it up on a curb, you need ramps. Your route will become so very circuitous.
"Wealthy parents come in armed with lawyers to get the public to pay for the particular school they want, or for a tutor offering a very specific kind of tutoring that may or may not be appropriate. Parents without money, recent immigrants, or others that can't work the system end up not getting what their kids need because the district is overwhelmed with requests and end up wary of anything as their budgets are blown up by out of district costs."
`I'm glad you cited the test accommodation issue in higher ed. These accommodation forms roll in at the beginning of every semester and are just accepted now as a fact of life.'
I'll push back on this, slightly. I teach at a very good university, in a very difficult discipline (electrical and computer engineering) and I have not seen a dramatic rise in the number of students seeking accommodations in my +15 year career. Those students who do seek accommodations tend not to do particularly well in class, so it's unclear to me that they're just trying to gain an advantage let alone achieving it.
I’ve never really understood why testing accommodations are seen as such an advantage (with the exception of the people who actually need those accommodations like the severely ADHD like you mentioned). I don’t think there was ever a test in the entire 20+ years I was a student (except maybe the SAT) that I ran out of time on. And my experience both as a student and a teacher is that staring at a problem you don’t know the answer to for 20 extra minutes does not help you come up with the answer.
Yep. “…incorporeal and inaccessible beyond, [and construed as immune to reasonable examination solely because it’s,] someone’s experience.”
And “What would it look like, exactly, to build a society in which any condition is just an equally-valid way of being?” Answer: not unexpectedly, a society like the one that’s being rammed down our throats by the amoral elites liberals are screaming to distinguish themselves from right now— one where rampant possessive individualism robs human relatedness of any verifiably moral core.
To bring two of your favorite topics together: I just read Fourth Wing, which is a silly romantasy novel about sexy war cadets and dragons, written in a YA voice.
The protagonist is disabled - and this is a fantasy, so fine - but I had to laugh at the audacity of the ideas in the writing. The protagonist is allowed a saddle on her dragon, because she is special. Others are not, and some cadets fall to their death during their first flight. Its just assumed that large percentages of cadets will die, and nothing is done about it, unless you are special, then you can have equipment that makes your safer. Which is... an inhumane way to treat people!
Despite the silliness of this book, it is extremely popular and hailed as a landmark of disability visibility and right action. Its probably one of the mostly widely read sources of disability ideas in our culture right now.
The lawyers say that people with disabilities need better access to e-commerce and not adopting Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards is a clear violation of the ADA.
Love this. I was shocked when I went back to grad school in 2010 after graduating from an Ivy in 1996 that suddenly everyone had ADHD and needed extra time for everything. I have no doubt that some people actually do but line a third of the class? And all recent college graduates. I had a medical problem that required me to take a leave of absence, about which the university was very helpful. I got my masters with straight As and A+s.
How is it supposed to work with employers. I hire someone from school X because I think they will have the cognitive ability to do X tasks in y time. And then I hire them and they say, “Sorry, I need 2y time.”
As I think back on this, all three of the guys I had to fire this way were going through ugly divorces and had substance abuse issues that exacerbated things. I only found out later.
For what it's worth, until very recently I worked at a consulting firm that hired undergrads almost exclusively from Ivy+ schools, and on day-to-day leadership teams we definitely noticed the issues this was causing. Interestingly, ADHD was less of an issue in my experience, since those analysts were mostly able to manage their conditions with medication and focus enough to do the job. Anxiety, however, has been a major problem - we had a lot of new hires that couldn't handle direct critical feedback, would crumble under the hours and the timelines, and just fail at the work because we can't change any of those things
We had a disability affinity group and did all the other niceties, but in the end the company fires those analysts for under-performance the same way we would anyone else. Not everyone can do every job, and I think most would admit they're better off in different, more accommodating roles.
On the flip side, I also once had a brilliant analyst who was nearly blind. I don't know the exact details, but our IT team made a few specific accommodations - extra monitors, specific software, etc. - that made the work feasible for her. Her work was consistently excellent and her performance reviews reflected that. Shows the power and value of reasonable accommodations as well
Some people have never failed at anything in their life. I went to a nominally elite school and the freshman year stomping was a useful rite of passage. More than half the class had never gotten anything besides an A in high school and now some of them would fail physics. Really resets the mind. Has that changed in the past 20 years?
I've had a similar experience with a blind person. Seeing people with genuine unambiguous disabilities who could easily come up with excuses not to work just blast right through things really puts things in perspective. They probably aren't distracted by TikTok or, er, Substack.
An easy solution is what we implemented at several companies. Stretched out the probationary period from 60 days to 6 months. It is very hard to fake performance that long. We also added a qualifier that any employee that completed a probationary period but was subsequently terminated for performance in the following 1.5 years had a comment noted into the hiring manager’s performance review. This insured that lessons were learned. The actual experience is that we really had few problems with college grads not adapting quickly to the new norms. Kids learn quick and respond to incentives like all humans do. The ubiquitous reality of having to make student loan payments, rent (etc), and wanting to be part of a successful team grinds most of us to grow up and put our GI Joes and Barbies away. And one might add now, performatively worn disabilities.
Wow. Freddie. I've been torturing myself over this for literally decades. When I was in elementary school we did a disability awareness thing. (Was it a day, a week? I don't know). My school district was extremely liberal. 1970's Newton, Mass! I remember that the teacher said that "people who can't walk aren't less, they are just different". I tried and tried (I was racked with guilt over my discomfort with the hypothetical idea of making friends with a disabled student), to believe the teacher. I really wanted to be good. But it didn't make sense to me. Isn't someone who can't walk able to do LESS than a person who could walk ?So how is that "just different"? I never had much to do with the disability world, so I put it out of my mind. But it always tickled my brain. Fast forward to having a child at age 30, who turned out to be severely autistic/non-verbal. People started telling me that he was "just different". And it really started to piss me off. Didn't they understand that it's not "just different" to be that vulnerable? To not be able to communicate? How about not being able to take care of basic hygiene? A 22 year old who can't clean themselves (yes at the most basic level) isn't "just different". Combine this with my experience working in a super woke academic department - where all the things Freddie is describing are happening- and this essay is just what I needed.
I imagine it also hurts to have the word “autistic” hijacked by high-functioning Asperger’s folks, when your life caring for a traditionally severe autistic kid is intensely warped by the demands of it. I’ve seen it a little as a GAL on adult guardianships, gone to the houses, and people in social media using “autistic” to mean “smart, awkward and likes trains” have done a lot to erase the awareness of what you have to deal with.
Aspergers is still an actual disability, it's not being "smart, awkward, and liking trains". Most of us still need accommodations and struggle with unemployment and relationship issues. The problem is that people have started straight up self diagnosing themselves as autistic- it's why you see all these autism influencers who have no autistic traits whatsoever.
Gangsta.
Just wait until you get the deaf rights crowd on your case.
Sorry, can't fix deafness. That would destroy the deaf community.
hard to really neatly sort out What It Means but there's definitely a lot of What It Means about how the nyc subway is the most egregious widespread ada violation i've ever come across, like the wealthiest city in america, a permablue city in a permablue state doesn't value the ada enough to make it apply to the most critical peace of public infrastructure in the city
Sitting right now on an MTA subway train I’d say they believe keeping the system just moving enough at all is the priority as it is squarely in the physical danger zone for all riders, and extra especially plagued recently by aggressive, transmissive, and trending-to-violence unhoused people. Every day for the last week a child under 10 has walked through my car (and I use 3 different lines) selling candy, alone. You should see the tacky puddles of ?? in the floor under my feet.
All to say, concern over NYC’s dire infrastructure of America’s largest urban rail ridership and the safety— ok gotta stop a man is screaming curses right now behind me.
Okay last stop for me.
Anyway, permablue??? That stuff is for political society mind games. The concept doesn’t have much bearing on the millions of people with their feet on the ground and sticking to the subway car floors.
People with disabilities are people, all the people in New York City are people, to pick the single worst example of access, safety, and reliability, that’s low hanging fruit that’s already in the grass and rotting.
And one last thing, since I’ve been in New York City the last few weeks I have also noticed they’re now making public announcements on every train I‘ve ridden specifying which stations have elevators that are ahead of us and which don’t, letting passengers know that if they need the elevator to exit at a prior or subsequent station, then take a city bus back to their chosen destination.
These announcements are recent, so they are making— by the standard of the MTA— a very reasonable effort. It is the mountainously mind-boggling truth of the deteriorating subway system that characterizes simply these announcements alone as a welcome reasonable effort.
BTW all New York City MTA buses are equipped as per ADA guidelines. And they really work well. So there’s that.
As with most trends these days, I think it comes down to social media and its incentives. Material stuff is not cool or sexy, doesn't inflame culture war, and won't get you likes and followers on social media. Vibes-based stuff gets you all of that and more.
astute.
Material drift: I eventually tuned out all ADA/"disability"-inflected stuff, because it was just so much Thoughts And Prayers at best, or thinly-veiled Harrison Bergeson apologia at worst. What finally garnered some actual sympathy and understanding from me was a materialist argument advanced by infamous far-left radical Steve Sailer, describing the "curb-cut effect"...that is, that many accommodations like ramps, sidewalk grading, grab bars, etc. are useful and appreciated *even by the abled*. Ramps are great when pushing a stroller or hand truck, just like for wheelchairs! It's nice having an extra surface to balance personal belongings on while on the can! Elevators are way safer than escalators and stairs! So even from a narrow self-interest angle, all morals and "rights" aside, it's worth advancing these types of physical accommodations on the margin rather than cede all infrastructure to relentless cost-cutting optimization. It's shameful that I didn't get this lesson from actual progressives, who profess to care the most about the disabled...too busy rewriting the latest edition of Approved Language To Use When Referring To People Experiencing Disability. Which is important because the words we use manifest the change we want, or...something something stigma reduction, I guess?
To jpmeyer's point above, NYC would be so much better for travelers with heavy luggage if elevators, ramps, escalators, etc. were more prevalent.
DC metro may not be as extensive but it seems a lot more accessible.
I appreciate the truth of the "curb-cut effect" — and have felt that appreciation increase since becoming the steward of a tiny human whom I move about in a stroller — but I have seen this concept getting abused in higher ed, where one often hears employees of the teaching and learning centers or the disability resource centers (many of whom have either never taught actual students in an actual classroom themselves, or, if they have, it was third-graders, or fifteen years ago as a TA a couple of times) state as an article of faith that if instructors just *design in the accommodations* all students will benefit (cue discussion of the utility of curb-cuts by non-disabled people — *everything* is like a curb-cut!).
Early in my teaching career, I bought this, or tried to, and I watched the norm in my departments shift toward doing this based on some combination of uncritical acceptance and fear of being painted as unconcerned with equity, access, and student wellbeing. Providing PowerPoint slides for the lecture to students before the class was probably the most common accommodation I saw back then, and in the spirit of "universal design," instructors were encouraged to provide slides in advance for *everyone*, not just the students with that accommodation, and there was a lot of chirpy "It helps everybody!" discourse flying around — Consider students who miss class due to illness! Or want to focus on what you're saying while you lecture instead of writing down the content of the slides! It helps students with different learning styles! It wasn't until everyone had been doing this for literal years that a few brave souls started revisiting outmoded ideas like, "Taking good notes while listening to someone talk is a professional skill that students can become better at in college if they practice," and, "The work of distilling the main ideas of a lecture into notes — of deciding what to write down and what to leave out — requires you to recapitulate the material in your own words, which is how you actually learn," and, "Maybe the reason students are all so depressed and lonely and anxious and sucking at academics is that they don't come to class anymore, and maybe that's got something to do with the fact that we've made it possible to access all the content without showing up!"
Which is to say, there were tradeoffs to universalizing this accommodation, but it would have been heretical to express that because the universal design dogma was so entrenched, and the curb-cut effect was a big part of the justification.
I could go on and on... there are so many examples of disability center staff justifying some extremely burdensome accommodation or encouraging faculty to "just" give it to everyone with the rationale that it's just like a curb cut — not because it is, but because their worldview depends in part on the curb-cut effect being universal. If it's not, their job isn't "promoting access and inclusion." These people are typically overworked and underpaid, and it's much easier to put up with that if you believe you're doing the lord's work. If you're just protecting the university from ADA lawsuits (which, to be clear, is the actual job), why bother?
For sure, any model can produce perverse results if taken out of distribution or pushed to extremes. I actually hadn't realized the printed PP slides thing was considered an "accommodation" - no one framed it that way to us students at the time, that was just How Things Arbitrarily Were sometimes (not every class would do it), and mostly led to a ton of wasted paper because people suck at PowerPoint.
Keep trying to add a more substantial response but I feel like I'm just reiterating Classic Freddie. The situation in academia is unfortunate these days; I feel sorry for the young people paying more for a worse education than I got, one that doesn't challenge them with the same kind of stakes. Like, yeah, it sucked to eventually drop out of college like a failure, but it was also a huge wake-up call to turn my life and self-assumptions around. Feels like so many people just sort of...academically malinger these days, subsisting on well-intentioned accommodations and stigma-reducing sympathy, only to eventually graduate with a mediocre degree that didn't prepare them for either the modern workplace or life more generally. (And Freddie would explain that's cause we value relative ability much more than absolute ability...)
Oh yeah, I'm not saying *you're wrong*, I'm just saying even this smart and useful idea (whose originator probably wouldn't have depicted it as anywhere near so broadly relevant!) is getting stretched and warped to serve other purposes by the particular disability ecosystem that we're currently living with in higher ed.
And I'm totally not surprised that the PowerPoint slides thing wasn't perceived as an accommodation by students. All those accommodation letters we get are private (and don't even tell us what disability we're accommodating, so I have no idea how the prevalence of various diagnoses has changed over time — just the prevalence of specific accommodations), so faculty have every incentive not to acknowledge that accommodations are even being granted, or to refer to what they are, and the voices calling for universalizing those accommodations are doing so in fora from which students are totally excluded — faculty meetings, departmental faculty email lists, workshops and trainings put on by the teaching center and disability services staff, presentations at faculty retreats, etc. There are these totally student-free channels where faculty explicitly and implicitly negotiate norms around what we do and do not do for students, and the norms can be somewhat coercive, especially for pre-tenure faculty, both because you're seen as not supporting what is in students' best interest if you don't go in on a practice that has been dubbed "inclusive", and because the students develop expectations based on what happens in the bulk of their classes. If you deviate from a norm that students like, you hear about it.
Adjuncts are in many cases in a much more difficult position, because they're still subject to student complaints if they deviate from the norms, but unless they've been teaching in the department for a long time and the department is super-proactive about including them, they have no idea what the norms are — they aren't in those fora where they get developed. And most of the students don't even know what an adjunct is.
That honestly sounds pretty wild? And also familiar, from other activist scenes where people purport to speak for [marginalized/patronized-to group] but don't necessarily actually consult with said group. Does anyone ever just...you know...ask the students what they do or don't need, and change practices accordingly? (I can already guess the rejoinder: no, you can't do that publically, else people might reveal that they're disabled/would like an accommodation, and that might cause *stigma*...) Like from a 90s environmentalist background, if I'd known back then that this is why I get all these useless PowerPoint printouts, I'd have been happy to privately inform teachers that they don't need to do that for me. Save a tree and all that. And maybe if a critical mass of like-minded did the same, that'd have shifted the norm, and people wouldn't assume that's the default behaviour going forward. Sad!
Appreciate the inside-baseball scoop, by the way. It's always fascinating to hear the nuts and bolts of jobs on the other side of the metaphorical counter.
Oh God, I never printed out the slides! I just shared them in digital format! I suspect one reason the practice of sharing them in advance has blown up since I was in college is that it's cheap to do it now. Man, I can imagine getting a stern talking to from the department manager if I wasted toner like that (everyone gets a unique copier code so they know who to come after for that sort of thing).
Students with accommodations are supposed to meet with faculty one-on-one on the first day of class to sort out which accommodations are actually needed in the class, and in every class I have 1-2 students who stay after on the first day because they want to go over their accommodations with me. I end up having to email the rest to try to get them to have the conversation, maybe 50% respond. Super stressful! And a lot of times they do end up saying, "Oh, I don't really need that accommodation."
Taking the temperature of a whole class is harder. I think I get a lot more information than a lot of faculty, both because students tend to find me approachable (I'm a small woman who smiles a lot and is willing to be goofy in class), and because I incorporate a lot of feedback mechanisms into my classes (everything from anonymous surveys to extra credit test questions to "raise your hand if you want to..." quick surveys). But you can't ask about every practice (there are too many!), and most of the time the number of students who like that you do X is equal to the number who don't like that you do it (per the anonymous surveys). When faculty discuss these things, we're all speaking from our own idiosyncratic mix of what we've heard students say, studies we've read, what we were told at some inclusive teaching workshop last month (or in 2003), and our personal beliefs about what the kids now days do and don't find helpful. So it's not so much a lack of interest in consulting with them as it is a practically difficult matter of figuring out the preferences of a heterogenous group of people in a reliable way. (Also: Research shows that students aren't necessarily great at assessing their own learning in real time, so even though we tend to equate "what they like" with "what helps them learn," those aren't necessarily the same.)
But, that's coming from a broke-ass public teaching university, where declines in retention (and by extension enrollment, and by extension tuition) could actually kill a department. People who teach at schools like that care A LOT more about students' opinions than people who teach at R1s.
Also, "academically malinger" is such a good term for it. I am totally with you in feeling sad for these kids going into debt for a crappy education, and I was always trying to remind my colleagues that "they're going into debt!" is a reason *to* hold them to standards, not a reason to just pass them through. The debt is just one more reason that the degree needs to have actually taught them something — otherwise, the money and the struggle to repay it doesn't actually get them much of anything. Put it like that and nobody will disagree with you, but when you're actually in the faculty meeting trying to point out that a lot of what is being proposed in the name of "accommodation" or relieving students' financial or emotional burdens will just make it easier for them to graduate without learning anything, you often sound (and feel) like a complete ogre.
“People in the disability rights world advocate for the “social model of disability,” which holds that a disabled person is not lacking in any capability, but rather that the human-built world was not made to accommodate that person; the problem isn’t the runner in the race but the designer of the course. ”
As many others did, I grew up in a time where the disabled were regularly mocked by children and adults alike, and I can’t imagine how hurtful and dispiriting that would be. But (and there always a but) the idea there’s some plane of reality where everything is peachy for everyone is just absurd. And while the activist’s heart might be in the right place, in the real world people will look at this tortured argument and say, “that is just crazy” and comfortably dismiss the rest. It actively works against the cause of disabled rights to espouse it.
To me this is a part of what I would observe as a larger rejection of the concept of 'normal' or at least a great queasiness about identifying or defending anything as normal, since there is an inherent exclusionary element to it. Obviously what is and isn't normal has been used as a cudgel in ways that a liberal person ought to reject as wrong and incompatible with the larger liberal project. However at a certain point that person also has to develop a theory of the world, and to understand why some things work and some things don't. That means drawing some lines, of which some things will end up on the wrong side.
Solutions to problems—ANY problem—should be quantifiable.
Otherwise, they only add to the problem.
The social model stuff leads to confusing language games. They'll say that disability is entirely social and then when people raise the obvious objection that many disabilities have intrinsic downsides they'll turn around and say "Um, actually, we make a distinction between disability and impairment. The intrinsically bad stuff is the impairment."
If only people would just say "Disability involves intrinsic downsides and downsides that emerge from a lack of social accommodation , so we should do what we can do minimise both" instead of redefining words and introducing complex jargon.
I remember when I was looking at what the social model of disability was about, and when I saw the distinction made between "impairment" and "disability", I thought, "Good grief, they're just using 'impairment' to describe what everyone else calls a 'disability', and then redefining 'disability'!" 🤦♂️ I wouldn't call the "social model of disability" a model at all. It's just an obscurantist word game.
I've been teaching design and disability for the last dozen years and am the parent of a teenager with Down syndrome. Much has changed in the small world of online rhetoric and in elite university practice in that time, as you've documented. In the last couple of years, I'm finding students CAN see how improbable the ballooning ADHD numbers are, CAN recognize the social media distortions of self-dx, etc. They're caught in it. But they do see something's off, and most of them crave good hard conversations about how to make sense. My main conclusion is this: when we jump from tangible reasonable accommodations to the vague and immaterial need to get "beyond" access, focus on stigma, medicalize ordinary human variation, it's partly a signal that schools and cultural institutions have abandoned any sustained attention to the question of suffering. Is suffering a given, non-optional part of life? Or is it a glitch in the body-as-machine? How do we distinguish our ordinary suffering from the unacceptable, and what do families and cultures and states do about it? Philosophical and ancient wisdom traditions are ready with insight, but schools don't teach these domains. So we stretch the logic of accommodations far beyond what it can hold. We speak in the thinnest therapeutic language for all our troubles. We resign ourselves to the ever-receding goalposts that hold something like "belonging," because we can't imagine shoring up forms of life outside the machines-and-markets shape of the modern world.
Is suffering a given, non-optional part of life?
Yes.
I'm glad you cited the test accommodation issue in higher ed. These accommodation forms roll in at the beginning of every semester and are just accepted now as a fact of life. I have known many students that genuinely needed them (veterans with TBIs, student with serious ADHD that causes them obvious life management issues). But the overall game is given away when a bunch of students only use them when they don't get the grade they wanted on the first exam, or seem upset when you assign take-home projects rather than timed exams. High school parents in competitive districts learned a long time ago that test accommodations are a thing to seek to give their children a leg up in the ridiculous competition for top 20 university admissions.
K-12 and special education mandates are another area with serious issues around disability issues. I don't envy any parent that has to fight the system to get what they think they need for the student, but a whole culture has arisen around special ed that isn't serving anyone well. Savvy parents with money or that are being supported by special ed "advocates" quickly learn what they can demand and will try to get things that their children don't even need. One example are full-time para-educators following individual students around all day and maybe spending 10% of their time actually supporting that child. Out-of-district placements are also through the roof and cost districts millions to send kids to private schools that continually increase their tuition because they know the districts are legally mandated to pay (or risk losing lawsuits which districts are loathe to pursue). Wealthy parents come in armed with lawyers to get the public to pay for the particular school they want, or for a tutor offering a very specific kind of tutoring that may or may not be appropriate. Parents without money, recent immigrants, or others that can't work the system end up not getting what their kids need because the district is overwhelmed with requests and end up wary of anything as their budgets are blown up by out of district costs. The whole system needs major reform, likely requiring public special ed schools to keep school systems from being bankrupted.
I have no idea how to solve for the general problem of "this rule put in place to help people X is now being exploited by people of means to gain advantage over each other." By definition they have means and know how to exploit the system and hire people to fight you in all the relevant arenas.
Also Freddie's talk of moving a wheelchair around Boston reminds me of similar things in that city and Boston is probably above average. Just as a test, roll a simple thing like an IV stand around a "walkable" city the next time you're in one. You aren't allowed to hop it up on a curb, you need ramps. Your route will become so very circuitous.
"Wealthy parents come in armed with lawyers to get the public to pay for the particular school they want, or for a tutor offering a very specific kind of tutoring that may or may not be appropriate. Parents without money, recent immigrants, or others that can't work the system end up not getting what their kids need because the district is overwhelmed with requests and end up wary of anything as their budgets are blown up by out of district costs."
It ain't just accomodations.
`I'm glad you cited the test accommodation issue in higher ed. These accommodation forms roll in at the beginning of every semester and are just accepted now as a fact of life.'
I'll push back on this, slightly. I teach at a very good university, in a very difficult discipline (electrical and computer engineering) and I have not seen a dramatic rise in the number of students seeking accommodations in my +15 year career. Those students who do seek accommodations tend not to do particularly well in class, so it's unclear to me that they're just trying to gain an advantage let alone achieving it.
My experience teaching over the last 18 years at a few different universities is that the number of testing accommodations has at least doubled if not tripled. FdB has been hearing the same thing from other academics. There may be differences between disciplines. Some data are available that reveal this trend. It's happening at the most "elite" campuses as well: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_312.80.asp https://www.chronicle.com/article/do-colleges-provide-too-many-disability-accommodations
In my experience, it’s happening *more* at the most elite campuses than anywhere else.
I’ve never really understood why testing accommodations are seen as such an advantage (with the exception of the people who actually need those accommodations like the severely ADHD like you mentioned). I don’t think there was ever a test in the entire 20+ years I was a student (except maybe the SAT) that I ran out of time on. And my experience both as a student and a teacher is that staring at a problem you don’t know the answer to for 20 extra minutes does not help you come up with the answer.
I agree with you - I think some students (and parents) pursue them because it is something they know they can get.
Yep. “…incorporeal and inaccessible beyond, [and construed as immune to reasonable examination solely because it’s,] someone’s experience.”
And “What would it look like, exactly, to build a society in which any condition is just an equally-valid way of being?” Answer: not unexpectedly, a society like the one that’s being rammed down our throats by the amoral elites liberals are screaming to distinguish themselves from right now— one where rampant possessive individualism robs human relatedness of any verifiably moral core.
To bring two of your favorite topics together: I just read Fourth Wing, which is a silly romantasy novel about sexy war cadets and dragons, written in a YA voice.
The protagonist is disabled - and this is a fantasy, so fine - but I had to laugh at the audacity of the ideas in the writing. The protagonist is allowed a saddle on her dragon, because she is special. Others are not, and some cadets fall to their death during their first flight. Its just assumed that large percentages of cadets will die, and nothing is done about it, unless you are special, then you can have equipment that makes your safer. Which is... an inhumane way to treat people!
Despite the silliness of this book, it is extremely popular and hailed as a landmark of disability visibility and right action. Its probably one of the mostly widely read sources of disability ideas in our culture right now.
The lawyers say that people with disabilities need better access to e-commerce and not adopting Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards is a clear violation of the ADA.
Logical and well reasoned argument that illustrates why so many people have been turned off by extreme liberalism~
Love this. I was shocked when I went back to grad school in 2010 after graduating from an Ivy in 1996 that suddenly everyone had ADHD and needed extra time for everything. I have no doubt that some people actually do but line a third of the class? And all recent college graduates. I had a medical problem that required me to take a leave of absence, about which the university was very helpful. I got my masters with straight As and A+s.
How is it supposed to work with employers. I hire someone from school X because I think they will have the cognitive ability to do X tasks in y time. And then I hire them and they say, “Sorry, I need 2y time.”
I guess you have to spend a few months documenting their deficiencies until you can fire them. Been there, done that.
As I think back on this, all three of the guys I had to fire this way were going through ugly divorces and had substance abuse issues that exacerbated things. I only found out later.
For what it's worth, until very recently I worked at a consulting firm that hired undergrads almost exclusively from Ivy+ schools, and on day-to-day leadership teams we definitely noticed the issues this was causing. Interestingly, ADHD was less of an issue in my experience, since those analysts were mostly able to manage their conditions with medication and focus enough to do the job. Anxiety, however, has been a major problem - we had a lot of new hires that couldn't handle direct critical feedback, would crumble under the hours and the timelines, and just fail at the work because we can't change any of those things
We had a disability affinity group and did all the other niceties, but in the end the company fires those analysts for under-performance the same way we would anyone else. Not everyone can do every job, and I think most would admit they're better off in different, more accommodating roles.
On the flip side, I also once had a brilliant analyst who was nearly blind. I don't know the exact details, but our IT team made a few specific accommodations - extra monitors, specific software, etc. - that made the work feasible for her. Her work was consistently excellent and her performance reviews reflected that. Shows the power and value of reasonable accommodations as well
Some people have never failed at anything in their life. I went to a nominally elite school and the freshman year stomping was a useful rite of passage. More than half the class had never gotten anything besides an A in high school and now some of them would fail physics. Really resets the mind. Has that changed in the past 20 years?
I've had a similar experience with a blind person. Seeing people with genuine unambiguous disabilities who could easily come up with excuses not to work just blast right through things really puts things in perspective. They probably aren't distracted by TikTok or, er, Substack.
An easy solution is what we implemented at several companies. Stretched out the probationary period from 60 days to 6 months. It is very hard to fake performance that long. We also added a qualifier that any employee that completed a probationary period but was subsequently terminated for performance in the following 1.5 years had a comment noted into the hiring manager’s performance review. This insured that lessons were learned. The actual experience is that we really had few problems with college grads not adapting quickly to the new norms. Kids learn quick and respond to incentives like all humans do. The ubiquitous reality of having to make student loan payments, rent (etc), and wanting to be part of a successful team grinds most of us to grow up and put our GI Joes and Barbies away. And one might add now, performatively worn disabilities.
Wow. Freddie. I've been torturing myself over this for literally decades. When I was in elementary school we did a disability awareness thing. (Was it a day, a week? I don't know). My school district was extremely liberal. 1970's Newton, Mass! I remember that the teacher said that "people who can't walk aren't less, they are just different". I tried and tried (I was racked with guilt over my discomfort with the hypothetical idea of making friends with a disabled student), to believe the teacher. I really wanted to be good. But it didn't make sense to me. Isn't someone who can't walk able to do LESS than a person who could walk ?So how is that "just different"? I never had much to do with the disability world, so I put it out of my mind. But it always tickled my brain. Fast forward to having a child at age 30, who turned out to be severely autistic/non-verbal. People started telling me that he was "just different". And it really started to piss me off. Didn't they understand that it's not "just different" to be that vulnerable? To not be able to communicate? How about not being able to take care of basic hygiene? A 22 year old who can't clean themselves (yes at the most basic level) isn't "just different". Combine this with my experience working in a super woke academic department - where all the things Freddie is describing are happening- and this essay is just what I needed.
I imagine it also hurts to have the word “autistic” hijacked by high-functioning Asperger’s folks, when your life caring for a traditionally severe autistic kid is intensely warped by the demands of it. I’ve seen it a little as a GAL on adult guardianships, gone to the houses, and people in social media using “autistic” to mean “smart, awkward and likes trains” have done a lot to erase the awareness of what you have to deal with.
Aspergers is still an actual disability, it's not being "smart, awkward, and liking trains". Most of us still need accommodations and struggle with unemployment and relationship issues. The problem is that people have started straight up self diagnosing themselves as autistic- it's why you see all these autism influencers who have no autistic traits whatsoever.