Professor of Law Katherine Macfarlane, Director of the Disability Law and Policy Program at Syracuse Law, has posted a draft of her forthcoming Ohio State Law Journal essay Debating Accommodations.
The essay describes the legal standards that control the decision to grant or deny a postsecondary reasonable accommodation request, and how the development of law that prohibits disability discrimination may have led to an increase in the number of accommodated students with disabilities. It also confronts the concerns articulated by recent articles and scholarship, including The Atlantic piece “Accommodation Nation,” describing the increased volume of accommodations. It considers the accuracy of the pieces’ legal arguments, as well as conclusions regarding misdiagnoses and malingering. Finally, it proposes a framework for debating the validity of reasonable accommodations that applies relevant legal standards and considers both the lived experience of disability and the current civil rights retrenchment.
Macfarlane concludes, “At a minimum, if the accommodations debate persists, it must focus on what the law actually requires and cannot continue to demonize the students that accommodations serve. It is fair to debate accommodations, but it is harmful to debate the increased presence of students with disabilities themselves.”