CW: Discrimination
Colleges and universities often refer to themselves as places where opportunities are created. Nonetheless, disabled students and employees still encounter barriers on campus.
According to Matthew Mattingly, retired multimedia director at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, these issues not only make things more difficult but also indicate how the whole system is failing by not paying attention. “The lack of accommodations at the university rises to the level of outright discrimination,” he said last week at a meeting in Northampton.
He talked about years of inaccessibility that have made it nearly impossible for disabled people to access the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus and get around safely on their own. Many of the problems haven’t been addressed and should have been dealt with years ago.
Mattingly talked about inadequate curb cuts, malfunctioning automatic doors, and delayed snow removal that leaves wheelchair users and others unable to reach dorms, classrooms, or dining halls. When a campus is built and maintained without disabled people in mind, every storm, every broken door, and every missing curb cut becomes a hazard.
The extent of these problems is even more troubling when considering that the overall number of disabled college students across the country has grown rapidly. At the University of Chicago, the number of students who qualify for accommodations has more than tripled over the course of eight years; at UC Berkeley it’s almost quintupled in fifteen.
At schools such as Amherst College, thirty-four percent of its undergrads are registered with the disability services office, while Harvard and Brown say more than twenty percent of students are disabled. In other words, disabled students make up a large portion of the student body on campuses nationwide, yet many institutions act as if providing an accessible education is optional.
This isn’t just an issue with physical infrastructure. Professors and faculty are sometimes reluctant when it comes to properly accommodating disabled students on campuses. Professors sometimes see these accommodations as giving disabled students an advantage over other students. For instance, Nicholas Wolfinger, a sociology professor at the University of Utah, worries that students are becoming “too used to advantages that won’t carry into the workplace.”
But accommodations aren’t meant to be advantages. They are tools that allow disabled people to participate fully in their college educations. If you don’t grant accommodations, then you’re essentially treating your disabled students as if they are problematic instead of another member of the academic community.
In 2024, after emailing the president of Greenfield Community College about my frustration with its disability services office, she forwarded my email to the former provost. He finally responded to me two months later suggesting that I transfer to a different college instead.
Instead of providing support or ensuring I received the accommodations I needed, he essentially told me I was the problem. He felt that my needs were unreasonable. In his view, the college wasn’t obligated to provide accommodations.
Despite advocating for myself, his advice was simply to leave and get an education elsewhere. This kind of response only reinforces the belief held by some faculty members that disabled students are burdens on a college’s community and should go elsewhere if they don’t fit into their expectations of what a student should be.
The fact that colleges and universities are not accessible is not a coincidence. It’s a consequence of decades of design decisions, costs and cultural norms that assume that disabled people are not a priority.
Colleges and universities should not brag about improving opportunities if disabled students cannot access buildings, are refused accommodations, or are told to transfer when seeking help. Making something accessible means listening to disabled people, providing funding for accessibility, and making inclusion a reality. There is no excuse for discrimination.
Sources:
Gelinas, Samuel. “‘Meet the Moment,’ Disability Advocates Urge at Statewide Session Held in Northampton.” Greenfield Recorder, Newspapers of New England, Inc., 17 July 2026, http://www.recorder.com/2026/07/17/meet-the-moment-disability-advocates-urge-at-statewide-session-held-in-northampton/.
Horowitch, Rose. “Accommodation Nation.” The Atlantic, 2 Dec. 2025, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2026/01/elite-university-student-accommodation/684946/.