How Universities Are Shutting Out Disabled Students and Staff

Some administrators treat accommodations as a favour—and those requesting them as problems

This article discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call the Suicide Crisis Helpline (988) or the Hope for Wellness Helpline for Indigenous people (1-855-242-3310).

NAOMI HAD ALWAYS hated school, so much so that she cried for hours when school breaks ended. She hadn’t always considered herself disabled, though. Sure, she’d felt lucky to have discovered her autism and learning disabilities relatively early—and to have started getting accommodations in junior high— given that most autistic women aren’t diagnosed until adulthood, if at all. But until her second semester of university, Naomi hadn’t realized how much autism impacted her life. Then, just before semester’s end, COVID-19 crashed in.

Before lockdown, Naomi had been planning to skip classes for a couple of weeks because she felt herself hurtling into autistic burnout. The phenomenon looks different to every person affected by it, but for her, it includes stress responses like difficulty maintaining personal hygiene, being almost too exhausted to leave bed, nausea, lack of interest in life, and brain fog.

When her Toronto university moved online, Naomi initially felt happy. Excited, even. (I’m not using Naomi’s real name nor that of the university.) The sudden freedom from the intense sensory overload of campus brought a realization: she had been ignoring the effects of her disabilities throughout her education, suppressing and hiding her autism—what autistic people call “masking”—to fit into neurotypical classrooms. “I didn’t realize how stressed I was,” she says, “and how much I was overexerting myself all the time.” Previously, it’d never occurred to Naomi to request remote-learning accommodation, nor had her university’s accessibility adviser ever suggested it. In lockdown, Naomi grasped that it was crucial for her survival. She saw what she describes as “a window into: Things can be different. Life can be better.”

But in the fall of 2021, Naomi’s university announced that most classes would be in person as of the following January. Naomi wrote to the accessibility services office to kickstart the accommodations process, hoping she could continue to attend classes remotely, through a livestream or via lecture recordings. (Naomi knew that her university allows its disability studies program to hold classes remotely.) Since disability accommodations are protected under human rights law, the only way an entity like a university can legally deny a disability accommodation request is by proving that granting it would pose an undue hardship—mainly, that it would be prohibitively expensive to enact. A recorded lecture wouldn’t pose any significant additional cost to the university. Nonetheless, Naomi’s request was denied.

For a time, Naomi tried to fit into non-disabled academic spaces without the remote-learning accommodation. The first day of school in September 2022 was one of her worst. Naomi hadn’t been on campus for two and a half years. But she had to complete a degree-requirement course offered only in person.

Naomi strapped on a white N95 mask. (She’s keenly aware that disabled people face higher rates of long COVID and continues wearing a mask to protect herself and others, though that day, she noticed nobody else on campus seemed to be taking the same precautions.) Despite a deep sense of dread, she marched to class. Even made it to the door. But then, deluged with sensory overwhelm, she panicked and fled. Once off campus, she disenrolled from the course. She had a 4.0 GPA, yet the university’s resistance to her needs made her wonder: Would she ever be able to graduate?

FOR DECADES BEFORE the pandemic, disabled people in academia had pleaded for the very accommodations nearly everyone enjoyed during lockdown, including remote attendance, asynchronicity, and lecture transcripts. “There is lots of irony there. [Disabled people] were always told this was impossible,” says University of Waterloo professor Jay Dolmage, founding editor of Canadian Journal of Disability Studies. “We have had an opportunity, over the past five years, to redesign higher education in ways we never have before.”

That opportunity has been largely squandered. Aspects of Naomi’s story echo the experiences of other undergraduate and graduate students I spoke with across three provinces, at least two of whom dropped out due to their universities’ hostility toward the accommodations that would allow them to study on a level playing field alongside their peers.

In interviews with students and employees, I’ve heard variations of the same tale: universities tout themselves as victorious leaders in equity, diversity, and inclusion, with websites trumpeting their commitments to human rights. Yet many I spoke to encountered intransigent administrations with, at best, a lack of training in disability rights—and, at worst, entrenched dogmas about disability not belonging in the academy.

To wit, some non-disabled people consider disability accommodation akin to a favour, an unfair advantage. The rationale for legal protections of disability accommodation disproves that: society is designed for non-disabled people—which inherently disadvantages disabled people. That’s why it is illegal for employers and service providers to deny reasonable, necessary disability accommodation under human rights law. In academia, however, a cynical skepticism abounds: Are too many people receiving disability accommodation? Do those receiving accommodation actually need it? Does disability accommodation decrease a university education’s quality? Are people faking disability to get an easier ride?

In December 2025, for example, The Atlantic published a piece arguing that rich kids, especially at elite US colleges and universities, were “taking advantage of an easily gamed system” by racking up diagnoses for disabilities they didn’t actually have so as to “gain an unfair edge.”

In 2024, in a Chronicle of Higher Education article originally entitled “Do Colleges Provide Too Many Disability Accommodations?” US religion professor Alan Levinovitz wrote, “Students and instructors are rightfully concerned about fairness and compromised rigor,” and said “students who don’t need them” were skating by with accommodations. This set off the Twittersphere; Levinovitz lashed out at disabled leaders who criticized his piece, and then defended himself with an offensive descriptor, asking whether one critic knew if his parents “suffered from” disabilities. (The article title was changed following the protests.)

Around the same time, in this magazine, University of Toronto instructor Simon Lewsen wrote about his worry that “university bureaucracies are robbing instructors of their academic freedom by compelling them to offer accommodations,” and that by granting “too many [accommodation] requests, I’ll create a class without stress or friction—the stuff that makes learning happen.”

The reality is that a large corps of disabled people in academia is already overly familiar with stress and friction. In his 2017 book Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education, Dolmage charts academia’s historic hostility toward disability, highlighting how universities were built to bar disabled people from participating as scholars—think steep staircases leading up to ivory towers—while the field exploited them as research subjects or shunted them to shadow institutions such as asylums. Dolmage writes: “Disability has always been constructed as the inverse or opposite of higher education.”

This is only heightened during pandemics and their aftermath. Starting in the late 1800s in the United States, cities passed what became known as “ugly laws,” making it a criminal offence for disabled people—including those disabled by the 1918 flu pandemic—to be seen publicly. If disabled people couldn’t go out in public, they were most definitely kept out of schools and universities.

The last ugly law wasn’t repealed until 1974, amid the US disability rights movement, which was being led in part by Judy Heumann and Ed Roberts, founding members of the world’s first Center for Independent Living. Both were post-polio wheelchair users who’d initially been denied access to education because of their disabilities. At my alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley, an administrator famously told Roberts, “We’ve tried cripples before, and it didn’t work.”

“People with visible signifiers of disability have historically, post-pandemic, been driven out of institutions like universities,” says former Toronto Metropolitan University instructor and PhD graduate Tanya Pobuda. “Nobody wants to be reminded of the plague. They want to move on.”

That erasure isn’t just history—it’s unfolding in real time. The World Health Organization still categorizes COVID-19 as a pandemic. But because governments lifted public health restrictions, much of society thinks of COVID-19 only in the past tense and has transitioned into a 2019-style existence. Over more than a year of reporting, it’s become clear many administrations deem the accessibility widely available in 2020 and 2021 to be inconceivable and unfeasible now.

FOR SEVERAL SEMESTERS, Naomi emailed faculty and administrators, asking for assistance. Meanwhile, she signed up for the few classes still offered online. She said the head of the accommodations office asked her if she ever ventured outside her home, the implication being that Naomi was irrationally afraid of the world. (Much of the university’s communication during the clash, Naomi says, felt like gaslighting, “trying to convince me that this is not disability related, this is mental health related. I’m telling them that this is my need,” Naomi says, and “they heavily implied that it’s anxiety.” Regardless, mental health disabilities legally qualify for accommodation.) Another administrator recommended retreat as a tactical solution: Naomi should just transfer.

An associate dean wrote to Naomi: “[W]e are hopeful that there may be general improvements to your health and that this may influence your ability to come to campus.” (Disabled current and former employees at various universities I’ve spoken with mentioned facing this same rhetoric of “go away until your disability is fixed.”) As if autism—or any disability—needs curing.